Overview
- An appeals court denied Attorney General Rob Bonta’s emergency petition on a filing technicality, leaving the broader fight over Riverside County’s seized ballots unresolved.
- Sheriff Chad Bianco, a GOP candidate for governor, took custody of roughly 1,000 boxes holding more than 650,000 ballots from the November 2025 Proposition 50 election after a citizen group alleged about 45,000 more votes were reported than ballots received.
- State officials say the warrants may lack probable cause and that the sheriff’s office is not authorized or trained to run a hand count, and a superior court has appointed a special master to oversee any review to protect ballot handling.
- Riverside County’s registrar says the alleged gap stems from a misunderstanding of raw intake data and pegs the true variance at 103 votes, while election experts warn that removing ballots from official custody can break the chain of custody that safeguards audits.
- Coverage splits along partisan lines, with right-leaning outlets casting the AG’s move as secrecy and left-leaning outlets calling the seizure baseless and political, as Bianco’s probe targets a measure that passed comfortably statewide and by more than 82,000 votes in the county.