Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco seized approximately 650,000 ballots in February from a November 2025 special election on congressional redistricting. The measure had passed statewide and won in Bianco's own county by roughly 80,000 votes. His stated basis: a complaint from a local citizens group that "the count was off." Local election officials had already investigated and found the complaint unfounded. Bianco was running for governor at the time. The California Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the seizure was unlawful. State law requires voted ballots to remain in the custody of election officials, even during a criminal investigation. The court ordered Bianco to return the ballots and to refrain from further handling them. Bianco did not comment on the ruling. Governor Gavin Newsom framed the decision as a defense of democracy and pointed to a bill he signed Saturday that explicitly prevents anyone from seizing ballots as Bianco did. "The new laws I signed just last week add new protections so attacks like this cannot happen again," Newsom said. The legislative patch closes the gap that Bianco exploited — using criminal-investigation authority as a pretext to physically remove election materials from official custody. The broader context makes this case load-bearing. The Trump administration in January seized ballots and documents from a Georgia election office. Trump has repeatedly disputed the 2020 election results, citing unsubstantiated fraud. Some Republican officials have mirrored this rhetoric at the state and county level. Election officials and civil rights groups were watching the Bianco case specifically because it tests whether local law enforcement can unilaterally confiscate election materials — a power that, if normalized, would give any sympathetic sheriff a veto over certified results. Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta challenged the seizure immediately, arguing Bianco had no authority over election materials and that the seizure was designed to sow distrust. The UCLA Voting Rights Project also sued on behalf of Riverside County voters. Bianco refused to comply with Bonta's order to return the ballots, forcing the issue to the state supreme court. The structural question is whether this ruling and the new legislation create durable guardrails or merely patch a specific exploit. Bianco demonstrated that a single county sheriff, armed with a flimsy complaint and gubernatorial ambitions, could physically remove 650,000 ballots from election-official custody for months. The court and legislature responded, but the playbook is now public. The test comes in November 2026 and beyond: will other officials in other states attempt the same move where no such statutory prohibition exists? What this case reveals is a fragility in election infrastructure that most people assumed was protected by norm rather than statute. California has now converted that norm into law. Most states have not.
