Overview
- Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco seized roughly 1,000 boxes holding more than 650,000 ballots from the November 2025 special election on Proposition 50, saying his office will physically count them.
- A Riverside County judge has appointed a special master to supervise any counting, after an initial start and pause to the sheriff’s review.
- Bianco’s investigation stems from a volunteer group’s claim of 45,896 excess votes based on handwritten intake logs, a method county officials say misunderstands preliminary tallies.
- Registrar of Voters Art Tinoco says official systems show a net variance of about 103 ballots, far below state tolerance levels, and rejects the volunteer analysis.
- Attorney General Rob Bonta’s Feb. 26 and March 4 letters raised probable‑cause concerns about the warrants and objected to using untrained sheriff’s staff to count ballots; Secretary of State Shirley Weber also criticized the probe.