Riverside Sheriff Seizes More Election Materials in Probe

Riverside, Calif. Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco seized an additional 426 boxes of election materials this week from the county registrar of voters, escalating his investigation into alleged discrepancies in the November 2025 special election on Proposition 50 despite directives from California Attorney General Rob Bonta to halt the probe.

The investigation, launched in February after a complaint from the Riverside Election Integrity Team, centers on claims that machine counts recorded about 45,800 more votes than handwritten logs indicated were cast in the county. Bianco's office has now obtained three search warrants, resulting in the seizure of roughly 1,000 boxes containing more than 650,000 ballots. The sheriff maintains the effort is a standard fact-finding mission to verify election accuracy, with deputies physically counting ballots under the oversight of a court-appointed special master. "This investigation is just as much to prove the election is accurate as it is to show otherwise," Bianco said in a statement. He added that if the counts match, it would affirm trust in the process.

Riverside County Registrar of Voters Art Tinoco has refuted the allegations,...