The California Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments next month in two cases involving Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco.
During his recent gubernatorial campaign, Bianco ordered deputies to seize more than 650,000 ballots from the county voting registrar after a conservative group alleged 45,000 votes were miscounted in the landslide approval last November of the Proposition 50 redistricting measure.
One lawsuit, brought by Attorney General Rob Bonta, involves whether the attorney general has the authority to supervise county sheriffs, according to Bonta’s office. The attorney general sought to issue an order stopping what his office called “the Riverside County sheriff’s fishing expedition” to investigate alleged voting fraud.
The second lawsuit centers on the question of whether sheriffs can take possession of and remove voted ballots from the custody of election officials.
“The Elections Code is equally clear: local sheriffs have no authority to remove voted ballots from the secure custody of elections officials,” according to Bonta’s office.
Riverside City Councilwoman Clarissa Cervantes is the lead plaintiff in the suit filed March 25.
In April, the state Supreme Court agreed to review the Bonta case and temporarily blocked the sheriff’s investigation of the local voting system.
Bianco criticized the news media and Bonta for trying to politicize the sheriff’s investigation that led to the ballot seizure in March.
“We took the information to a judge, and the judge agreed; it’s really as simple as that,” Bianco told CalMatters. “Why not just get to the bottom of it and see what the difference in the numbers were?”
The sheriff has described the ballot probe as a “fact-finding mission” that he intended “just as much to prove the election is accurate as it is to show otherwise.”
Riverside County Registrar of Voters Art Tinoco has publicly rejected fraud claims. He told county supervisors in February that the Riverside Election Integrity Team, the group making the allegations, didn’t understand the data they were analyzing.
“Did the Nov. 4, 2025, statewide special election have a 45,896-ballot discrepancy between ballots cast and ballots counted?” Tinoco told the Board of Supervisors. “The answer to that is no.”
Bonta’s office summarized the motivation for legal actions following the ballot seizure.
“Our focus is on the sheriff’s responsibilities under the law — to provide sufficient evidence of probable cause in obtaining criminal search warrants, to allow (the) Riverside (registrar of voters) to retain physical custody of the ballots as required by the elections code, and to follow the Attorney General’s lawful directives, all of which he failed to do,” officials from Bonta’s office told CalMatters in April.
The court is scheduled to hear both cases 10 a.m. Aug. 24 during a special argument session in San Francisco.
Documents pertaining to the lawsuits are on the Supreme Court’s website.
