The California Supreme Court is slated to hear arguments on Monday, Aug. 24, in two lawsuits challenging Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco's seizure of around 650,000 ballots as part of an investigation into alleged voter fraud.
Attorney General Rob Bonta's lawsuit argues Bianco's investigation presents an "unprecedented constitutional emergency" and that the sheriff had no legal justification to seize the ballots from the county registrar of voters. A key question in the state's lawsuit is whether or not Bianco disregarded the attorney general's supervisory role over county sheriffs.
In a separate lawsuit, the UCLA Voting Rights Project asked the California Supreme Court to order Bianco to return the ballots to the Riverside County Registrar
of Voters, pointing to a state law that requires election materials to be held by elections officials.
Justices will hear both cases on Monday, with arguments scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. The court is required to issue its written ruling within 90 days.
A ruling has the potential to set important legal precedents over a sheriff's ability to conduct criminal investigations into the election process as well as the Attorney General's authority over local sheriffs. At stake is whether or not the attorney general can order a sheriffs department to stop an investigation.
Bianco has called the lawsuits against him politically motivated.
"It will be very interesting to see if the highest court in the state is going to decide the case by facts or by politics," he told The Desert Sun in early August.
The case also has national implications. It comes at a time when many conservatives, most prominently President Donald Trump, have argued for years — without evidence — that there is rampant voter fraud. Trump has continued to falsely claim that he actually beat Joe Biden in 2020, but that the result was "rigged" in Biden's favor, an allegation he made again this month.
Why did the Riverside County Sheriff's Office seize ballots?
A group calling itself the Riverside Election Integrity Team filed a complaint with the sheriff's office over alleged voter fraud, sparking the law enforcement investigation in February, according to the Riverside Record. The group has ties to United Sovereign Americans, a self-described nonpartisan nonprofit that some media organizations have linked to a national right-wing movement to challenge election integrity.
Locally, the Riverside Election Integrity Team said its own review of ballot records found 45,896 more ballots ultimately counted than were documented on election night for the Nov. 4, 2025, special election on Proposition 50, which temporarily replaces California's congressional districts with an alternative map that benefits Democratic candidates.
Sparked by what the sheriff's office described as "alleged irregularities," the investigation began in March with the seizure of hundreds of thousands of ballots. Deputies in Bianco's office got a warrant signed by a Riverside County Superior Court judge before taking the ballots into custody.
It came as Bianco was running for governor as a Republican. He eventually failed to advance to the general election during the June primary.
Why did the attorney general sue Sheriff Chad Bianco?
The Attorney General's Office initially ordered Bianco to pause all work and hand over the case file when it learned of the investigation. Bonta said in his office's lawsuit he had grave concerns about the legal sufficiency of the investigation as well as the potential damage to public confidence in the election process.
The California Constitution gives the attorney general broad authority over local law enforcement agencies to ensure that laws are equally and adequately enforced. It says the attorney general is the "chief law officer of the State" and "shall have direct supervision over every district attorney and sheriff … in all matters pertaining to the duties of their respective offices."
But when Bianco instead continued with the investigation, Bonta said the sheriff had "willfully violated" his office's orders.
Riverside County Registrar of Voters Art Tinoco said the allegation of voter fraud was unfounded and stemmed from a fundamental misunderstanding of how ballot counting works. He told the Board of Supervisors in February that handwritten ballot intake records on election night are not meant to be final tallies. He also said the Riverside Election Integrity Team had not included ballots from conditional registration voters, provisional voters and confidential voters in their count, which could have skewed their findings.
Ballots are not officially counted until the signatures have been verified, Tinoco added.
In the 2025 election, 103 more ballots were counted than had been verified, a variance of 0.016% out of the 657,322 ballots cast.
What is the UCLA Voting Rights Project?
The UCLA Voting Rights Project is a project of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs that was established to protect equal voting rights through litigation, research and advocacy.
In March, the organization filed its lawsuit on behalf of four Riverside County voters, including Indio Councilmember Oscar Ortiz. The other plaintiffs were Riverside City Councilmember Clarissa Cervantes, Rebecca Robinson, and Nathan Kempe, an advocate for increased sheriff accountability in the county.
The lawsuit points to a state law that requires ballots to be held in the custody of election officials. It asks the court to clarify the limits of law enforcement authority over such ballots.
Sam Morgen covers local government for The Desert Sun. Reach him at smorgen@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: California Supreme Court to hear Bianco ballot seizure case
