Search warrants that allowed Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco to seize hundreds of thousands of ballots in California’s 2025 special election were unsealed and publicized Wednesday, the same day the California Supreme Court ordered him to pause his fraud probe while judges review the legal challenge.
The warrants sat at the center of a fight between Bianco and state Attorney General Rob Bonta. They show how the sheriff’s department used allegations tied to the election to justify an effort that ultimately reached nearly 650,000 ballots cast in the November 2025 special election, which passed Proposition 50 and let California move forward with redrawing its congressional maps.
At the heart of Bianco’s case was a claim that the Riverside Election Integrity Team had identified an unexplainable disparity of some 45,000 votes. The Riverside County Registrar of Voters rejected that conclusion, saying the group’s concerns were unfounded and stemmed from flawed tallying. Using the registrar’s official standard for counting votes, local election officials found a discrepancy of only 103 ballots.
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Still, Riverside County sheriff’s investigators cited the activist group’s larger number as probable cause to get two search warrants, with investigator Robert Castellanos writing that there was probable cause “that a felony had been committed or that a particular person has committed a felony.” Those warrants, filed in Riverside County court between Feb. 9 and March 19, allowed deputies to seize about 1,000 boxes of ballots. A third warrant in March authorized the seizure of another 426 boxes.
Bianco said at a March press conference that the ballot collection was a “fact-finding mission” meant “to confirm the accuracy of the election.” But court documents say Bonta ordered Bianco and the sheriff’s department to stop the recount effort in late March and that they ignored his orders. Bonta asked for the halt after the warrants had already been used to gather the ballots, and Bianco pressed ahead while the dispute moved through court.
The timing leaves the case at a hard stop for now. The ballots tied to the 2025 special election have already been seized, the legal challenge is still being reviewed, and the question before the court is no longer whether Bianco had gone too far in public rhetoric, but whether his department had lawful ground to take possession of ballots on the scale it did.
