RIVERSIDE, Calif. (AP) — A California sheriff running for governor has confiscated more than 500,000 ballots cast in November’s special election from county election officials and said he is investigating discrepancies in the vote count.
County election officials dispute the claims of Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, a Republican. California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, called Bianco’s move unprecedented and said it was intended to sow distrust in the election.
Bianco held a news conference Friday and said his office launched the investigation after receiving complaints from local citizens groups about the counting of votes in the November 2025 redistricting special election.
In the special election, voters approved a measure to redraw congressional district lines to bolster Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections. The measure passed in the county by more than 80,000 votes.
Bianco captured votes in Riverside County, an inland California county of 2.5 million people where he has twice been elected sheriff. He called the effort “a fact-finding mission.”
“This investigation is simple: actually count the votes and compare the results to the reported vote totals,” he said on Friday.
Bianco is one of two prominent Republicans running for governor in June’s crowded primary that includes more than a half-dozen Democrats. California has a top-two primary system that puts all candidates on the same ballot, regardless of party, and sends the two candidates with the most voters to the November general election.
California Democratic leaders are concerned that their party has too many candidates and they risk splitting the vote by sending Bianco and another top Republican, Steve Hilton, to the general election. That would be a shocking result for this heavily Democratic state.
Bianco said the investigation has “absolutely nothing” to do with his campaign for governor.
“It is my responsibility to investigate alleged criminal conduct in Riverside County,” he said.
The move comes as President Donald Trump has repeatedly disputed the results of the 2020 election, citing unproven incidents of fraud. His administration recently seized ballots and other documents from an elections office in Georgia. Some Republicans mirrored Trump’s rhetoric about voting in their states.
Bonta sent letters to Bianco’s office multiple times over the past two months saying his staff was not qualified to conduct a recount. Bonta wrote in one of the letters that withholding ballots is “unacceptable” and “sets a dangerous precedent that will only sow distrust in our elections.”
The letter said Bianco had nearly 1,000 boxes of ballots and election materials seized from the county elections office on a warrant in February. Bianco said the problem lies in discrepancies between handwritten ballot records reported by citizen groups and the number of votes reported to the state.
Bianco said the alleged discrepancy was about 45,800 votes — a discrepancy that election officials dismissed at the county meeting, saying there was about a 100-vote difference between the machine count and the final tally submitted to the state. They argued that the handwritten rolls were kept by temporary election workers who worked long hours and could make mistakes and that the handwritten rolls were not used to check counts.
Bianco said on Friday that vote counting had started and stopped but would now resume under the supervision of a judge-appointed special master.
