Chad Bianco seized more than 650,000 ballots from the Proposition 50 redistricting race last year. On Monday, the California Supreme Court heard arguments over whether the Riverside County sheriff had the authority to do that. The dispute now moves toward a ruling that could define how ballots are handled before and after counting in later elections.
Bianco said he suspected there were tens of thousands more votes cast than there should have been, and he announced he was going to have his deputies recount the votes. That seizure became the focus of two legal challenges, one led by the election experts at the UCLA Voting Rights Project and a separate lawsuit filed by state Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta.
Justice Joshua Groban on warrant power
At the hearing, Justice Goodwin H. Liu told Bradley Hertz, Bianco’s lawyer, “That seems bizarre.” Justice Joshua Groban pressed Hertz on whether the sheriff’s reading of warrant power would let law enforcement seize ballots before voting finished, asking, “It seems like under your broad view of the warrant power... the sheriff could could seize ballots even before election day, right?”
Groban followed with another question: “Even before they were counted.” Those exchanges put the legal dispute in plain terms. The justices were not only weighing what happened in Riverside County last year, but whether the same approach could be used again in future elections.
Riverside County ballots in court
Bianco’s legal team argued he could act if he did not actually find criminal wrongdoing. That theory tries to separate the act of seizing ballots from a final finding that any election crime occurred. The justices’ questions suggested skepticism about treating that power as open-ended, especially before ballots are counted.
The case reaches beyond one sheriff and one special election. If the court accepts Bianco’s theory, election workers and law enforcement in California would face a wider claim of authority over ballots before counting finishes. If it rejects that theory, the ruling would set a tighter boundary on when ballots can be taken out of ordinary election custody.
The California Supreme Court has not yet issued its ruling. For Riverside County voters and election officials, the immediate result is that the seizure now sits inside the state’s highest court, with the scope of ballot-handling authority still to be decided there.
