Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco’s Ballot Investigation on Hold

Almost a week ago, I detailed how California Democrats were having a rough stretch. They’d just been subjected to the sight of two Republicans atop the poll for their own engineered jungle primary, which was specifically set up to exclude Republicans from ever seeing elected office in the state again.

CALIFORNIA POLL: Governor – top 2 advance (Villaraigosa Dem internal)

🟥 Chad Bianco: 15%
🟥 Steve Hilton: 15%
🟦 Eric Swalwell: 14%
🟦 Katie Porter: 13%
🟦 Tom Steyer: 10%
🟦 A. Villaraigosa: 7%
🟦 Xavier Becerra: 5%
🟦 Betty Yee: 2%
🟦 Thurmond: 1%

1/22-28 (released today) |… pic.twitter.com/735rjV8cQr

— InteractivePolls (@IAPolls2022) March 4, 2026

And then word came that gubernatorial candidate and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco had bested the CA Attorney General’s attempt to wrest back some 650,000 ballots he’d seized as part of a voting irregularity investigation.

Vote totals and ballots counted had almost a 46,000 vote difference between them, and the sheriff wanted answers that no one was willing to give him, which was particularly concerning, as this ballot decided Prop 50 – the controversial congressional redistricting question. So Bianco’d taken it upon himself to get ahold of the boxes and set his investigators to counting individual pieces of paper to see where the discrepancy had come about. He did so with a judicial warrant and authorization in hand, which is what foiled CA AG Rob Bonta’s initial flagrant attempt to impede.

How odd: the Attorney General of California is now against the chief legal officer of Riverside County, Sheriff Bianco , from looking into the odd discrepancy that only 610,000 people voted but almost 660,000 ballots showed up. Nothing odd about that. https://t.co/KIiS3mNqRn

— Patrick Byrne (@PatrickByrne) March 24, 2026

Bonta took his attempt to shut it all down and get the boxes of ballots back to the state appellate court. They denied Bonta’s filing and told him he needed to take it to the lower superior court.

Meanwhile, as of last Wednesday, Bianco had his investigators primed to start the recount.

Last Friday, Bonta went to the state Supreme Court for an emergency order, as well as getting a hearing scheduled in Riverside Superior Court, as directed by the appellate division.

…Meanwhile, California Attorney General Rob Bonta on Friday, March 27, opened another legal front in his fight to halt the investigation.

He asked the California Supreme Court for an emergency order to prevent what he called an “unprecedented constitutional emergency” that threatens to undermine the public’s confidence in elections.

That request comes as Bonta’s lawyers pursue a similar halt to Bianco’s probe in Riverside Superior Court. A Monday hearing in that case was postponed until Thursday, April 2.

Bonta previously sought an appellate court’s help in stopping the investigation, only to be told he needed to start with the superior court.

Also at the end of the week, the ‘Voting Rights Project’ of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) piled into the fight against recounting the ballots, asking the state Supreme Court to order the sheriff to return them

… The UCLA Voting Rights Project has launched its own legal effort to halt Bianco’s efforts, asking the California Supreme Court to rule that the ballots must be returned to the Registrar of Voters.

“The attorney general’s office has taken massive steps, at taxpayers’ expense, to prevent a lawful investigation from occurring. The only question that should be asked is why anyone would not want an investigation to occur,” Bianco said in a statement.

It seems so odd that no one in state government or any of the so-called defenders of democracy are the least bit interested in determining why there’s such a huge discrepancy between the two reports.

The official stance of the Registrar of Riverside, who is wholly unconcerned about the gap, is that people can’t count for crap, so quit getting your knickers in a wad.

 …A citizens’ group says Riverside County claimed handwritten logs showed that just over 611,000 votes were cast in November, where a machine count showed more than 657,000 ballots were counted.

At a recent Riverside County Board of Supervisors meeting, Registrar Art Tinoco stood by the machine count of the ballots, saying the handwritten logs reviewed by the citizen group were reference guides prone to human error.

And the county counsel’s office told the sheriff to find himself a new lawyer because they also represented the registrar.

…Robert Tyler, of the Murrieta-based Advocates for Faith & Freedom, is representing Bianco in court.

In a court filing, Tyler wrote that the county counsel’s office, which normally represents the sheriff, told Bianco to find another lawyer because county counsel represents the registrar of voters.

Convenient, no?

In any event, all the legal piling on has become a deluge that is too much to buck at the moment, and Sheriff Bianco called a time-out this morning until some of these challenges get settled.

An investigation into more than 650,000 Riverside County ballots from November’s special election is on hold until legal issues are resolved, Sheriff Chad Bianco said Monday, March 30.

Bianco, who is running for governor, said in an emailed statement Monday that the investigation is “on hold because of the politically motivated lawsuits and court filings.”

The Orange County Register couldn’t possibly resist the temptation to close out this story without a jab at you-know-who, which was also patently meant as a dig at Bianco.

JOURNALISMING

…The integrity of the ballots seized by Bianco “is now at risk,” its [CA AG lawyers’] brief added.

“And because the Sheriff ’s misguided investigation is predicated on baseless claims of election irregularities, the Sheriff ’s actions threaten to jeopardize public confidence in the upcoming primary and general elections, not just in Riverside County but around the State.”

Tyler, in his filing with the superior court, argued that it would be more damaging to public confidence in elections to halt the investigation now given the publicity it’s received.

With the November midterms on the horizon, Bianco’s investigation comes amid a continuing debate over the integrity of the nation’s elections. The sheriff is a proud supporter of President Donald Trump, who claims without evidence that voter fraud cost him the 2020 presidential election.

I don’t think they could be any clearer. 

The official position of the California Democratic Party is that the integrity of a ballot issue is at stake because of an investigation aimed at reconciling two widely disparate vote totals, and not because of state Democratic political machine operatives doing everything they can across the board to stop the counting.

AND ORANGE MAN BAD

I have a feeling that cognitive dissonance may resonate with more than one Californian who plans on voting.

Those two Republicans are on top of the polls for nothing.

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