Emails Tie Fringe Activists to Riverside Sheriff’s 650,000-Ballot Seizure

Overview

• Internal emails trace the case to 2022, when citizen groups pressed election-fraud claims and a senior sheriff’s investigator closed an initial probe after finding no crime.
• After contact from the constitutional sheriffs movement later in 2022, Sheriff Chad Bianco revived the inquiry despite expressing doubts about some allegations, according to the emails.
• In March 2026, Bianco removed about 1,500 boxes holding roughly 650,000 cast ballots from the Riverside registrar under a warrant that Judge Jay Kiel initially sealed.
• The sworn statement used to justify the warrant leaned largely on activist work by Greg Langworthy’s Riverside Election Integrity Team and claims from Shelby Bunch, with no independent evidence produced by deputies.
• Attorney General Rob Bonta urged a pause and then went to court to recover the ballots, as judges weigh custody, chain-of-custody and voter-privacy issues that could affect how votes are counted in contests such as Proposition 50 and California’s 48th Congressional District.