Overview
- Sheriff Chad Bianco’s team seized roughly 1,000 boxes holding more than 650,000 ballots from the November 2025 special election on Proposition 50 and says a paused physical count will resume under court oversight.
- A volunteer group claims a 45,896-vote gap based on handwritten intake logs versus certified totals, while Registrar of Voters Art Tinoco says those logs are imprecise snapshots and that the reconciled difference was about 103 ballots (≈0.016%).
- Attorney General Rob Bonta’s Feb. 26 and March 4 letters sought a brief pause, questioned probable cause in the search-warrant affidavits, and warned against having untrained sheriff’s staff count ballots, with further action still under review.
- Bianco, who calls the effort a fact-finding investigation rather than a recount, accused Bonta of interference and said the goal is to verify whether the reported numbers match a full physical count.
- Secretary of State Shirley Weber cautioned that ballot reviews should be conducted by elections professionals to protect confidence in results, and the county district attorney’s office has said it has not received election-related cases from the sheriff.