ICYMI: Republican Sheriff Illegally Seized California Ballots, Court Rules

New York Times: Republican Sheriff Illegally Seized California Ballots, Court Rules

The California Supreme Court on Thursday ordered a county sheriff to return about 650,000 ballots he seized from election officials as part of an investigation into voter fraud that state officials said had no basis in fact.

The state’s highest court in April had ordered Chad Bianco, the Republican sheriff of Riverside County, to halt his investigation as the court case challenging the seizure proceeded. The court determined on Thursday that Mr. Bianco had no authority to take the ballots cast in Riverside County during California’s 2025 special election on congressional redistricting.

The decision could have implications for the midterm elections in California: Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation last week that was intended to further block local officials from interfering in ballot counting.

Mr. Bianco said he began his investigation after complaints by activists in the county that stretches from the suburbs east of Los Angeles to the Arizona border. They claimed that vote tallies during last year’s special election did not match the ballots received. The supposed discrepancy, however, would not have affected the outcome of the vote.

California Supreme Court justices on Thursday issued unanimous decisions in two cases focusing on Mr. Bianco’s investigation, determining that the seizure of the ballots was unlawful and threatened the integrity of elections in the state.

“I would underscore the seriousness of the violation here. This is not a case involving a few documents,” wrote Associate Justice Goodwin H. Liu in a concurrent opinion published Thursday. “It involves the unlawful removal and handling by armed deputies of over 1,000 boxes of documents — and not just any documents, but the most precious documents of the citizenry in a democracy: their votes.”

The investigation centered on an election in which voters overwhelmingly approved a plan to redraw congressional districts to favor Democrats. The proposal, known as Proposition 50, passed with 64 percent of the statewide electorate voting in favor.

The gerrymander plan, backed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, was California’s response to Texas’s redrawing its district maps to improve the chances of Republicans winning more congressional seats.

“The High Court for the state of California has spoken,” Clarissa Cervantes, a Riverside city councilwoman and a plaintiff in one of the cases, said in a statement. “The rule of law has been upheld, and your sacred ballot and vote are constitutionally protected from any outside political interference.”

Mr. Bianco was running for governor at the time he began his investigation. In June, he finished a distant fourth and failed to advance to the general election.

Mr. Bianco did not immediately respond Thursday to a request for comment after the ruling.

The justices heard arguments in San Francisco on Aug. 24 in the two cases brought against Mr. Bianco and his investigation: one by voters in Riverside County, the other by California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, a Democrat.

During arguments, Mr. Bianco sat in the front row of the gallery, dressed in his khaki sheriff’s uniform, with a gun holster on his belt.

Speaking on the courthouse steps afterward, Mr. Bianco defended his right to seize the ballots and said he believed Mr. Bonta had illegally tried to impede his investigation into election fraud.

“This is about an attorney general who believes that he can stop an investigatory process into something that he doesn’t want us to know the answer to, and that was not the intention of our founding fathers,” Mr. Bianco said. “That was not the intention of the writers of our Constitution.”

In their decisions, the justices said that Mr. Bonta’s orders had been lawful and Mr. Bianco, as a county sheriff, was required to follow the attorney general’s orders to pause the investigation.

Mr. Bonta, in his own remarks last month in the marble lobby of the courthouse, said, “Why are we here? Because we have a sheriff who seized 650,000 ballots, started opening and counting ballots, 12,500 of them, and it was unlawful.”

“He created a constitutional crisis in the process,” Mr. Bonta added. “He acted in a rogue way, and most importantly, he acted unlawfully.”