California Supreme Court Rules Sheriff's Seizure of 650,000 Ballots Was Unlawful

The California Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Thursday that Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco broke state law when his office seized more than 650,000 ballots from last November's Proposition 50 special election, and ordered the material returned immediately to the county's top election official.

The twin decisions handed down in San Francisco amount to a sweeping rejection of the sheriff's seven-month effort to run his own investigation into the county's vote count. They also settle a question left unanswered since 1934: whether California's attorney general can order a county sheriff to stand down. The court said yes.

"Sheriff Bianco broke the law, violated the law, acted illegally," Attorney General Rob Bonta told reporters after the rulings. "We acted because we had to."

A Unanimous Rebuke From the State's Highest Court

Writing for the court, Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero found that California election law leaves no room for interpretation on who controls voted ballots. They stay with the county elections official. That rule, she wrote, carries no exception for a criminal investigation and no exception for a search warrant.

Bianco "had no authority to seize the ballots," Guerrero wrote. She added that the sheriff's argument "overlooks that allowing law enforcement unfettered access to ballots, or the ability to handle and count them in secret based on unregulated protocols, itself creates a substantial risk to election integrity."

The court ordered the ballots returned to the Riverside County Registrar of Voters and directed the sheriff to refrain from further handling them. It also required him to halt his investigation while Bonta reviews it, preserve everything else he took, and turn his case files over to the attorney general.

How a 103-Ballot Discrepancy Became a 650,000-Ballot Fight

The dispute started in February, when a citizens group told the sheriff's department that the county's numbers did not add up. Relying on handwritten ballot intake logs, the Riverside Election Integrity Team claimed the county had counted 45,896 more ballots than it received.

Registrar of Voters Art Tinoco said the actual gap was 103 ballots -- roughly 0.016 percent -- and blamed human error. The handwritten logs were rough field estimates, he explained, and the group's math left out about 6,000 ballots. Prop. 50 passed in Riverside County with 56 percent of the vote, and no party to the case has argued that any discrepancy could have changed the outcome.

By the time Tinoco walked the Board of Supervisors through those numbers, Bianco already had a search warrant, and his personnel were in the room for the presentation. When the department applied for a second warrant two weeks later, it told the judge the registrar "has not given a reason for the discrepancy." Deputies hauled away about 1,000 boxes of ballots on Feb. 26 and began hand-counting them a week later.

Bonta ordered the sheriff to stop. Bianco obtained a third warrant without telling the attorney general and seized more ballots anyway. In April, the state Supreme Court froze the entire operation.

A Broader Ruling on the Attorney General's Power

The second decision reached well beyond the ballots themselves. California's constitution has given the attorney general direct supervision over county sheriffs since 1934, but no court had ever defined what that supervision means in practice. The justices held that it means the attorney general can issue orders to a sheriff -- and that the sheriff is bound to follow them.

Justice Goodwin Liu wrote separately that the fight should never have reached the high court. County lawyers had declined to represent the sheriff, and Liu noted the seven-month standoff could have been sidestepped had Bianco sought their advice and taken it. "It should not have come to this," he wrote.

Secretary of State Shirley Weber had made the same custody argument in a friend-of-the-court brief, contending that the plain text of the Elections Code required the ballots to remain with the registrar.

What Happens Next Before November

The rulings are not final for 30 days, and Bianco can ask the court to reconsider. Whether the investigation ever restarts now rests with Bonta, who said his office has found no evidence of an election crime after more than six months of review. He declined to say whether he will close the matter for good.

Bianco has not been charged with any crime. Asked about possible criminal consequences, Bonta pointed to the court's orders and to the new laws making ballot seizure a felony in California going forward. Democratic leaders passed the measures after the sheriff's raid, and Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the package this month: one statute makes it a felony to seize, or order the seizure of, ballots, election records or voting machines before results are certified, while the other bars removing election materials outright.

Bianco, who ran unsuccessfully for governor as a Republican earlier this year, has endorsed Republican Michael Gates in the attorney general race. Gates is challenging Bonta in November and has promised to let the ballot investigation run to completion. In July, Bianco told local reporters that Bonta was "an absolute complete fraud that is abusing the power of his office."

For elections officials across the state, the timing matters as much as the outcome. Nationally, the Trump administration has pressed states to tighten election security, and the president's push to clean up voter rolls has become a defining fight of the midterm season. California's justices have now drawn one line clearly: ballots belong to election officials, and law enforcement does not get to take them.