Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco used Search warrants to seize 650,000 ballots from California’s 2025 election. Now those warrants are public, and the affidavits inside them are thin.
A Riverside County judge and the California Supreme Court ordered the documents unsealed Wednesday, after CalMatters and other outlets sued to force disclosure. Bianco had described the whole operation as “normal law enforcement.” Judge Jay Kiel, who signed the warrants, kept them sealed until the courts intervened.
What’s actually in the documents cuts against that characterization.
Bianco’s investigators brought no confidential informants to Kiel. No witnesses. No independent forensic work. What they had were unverified claims from a citizens’ activist group, and that was enough to get Kiel’s signature and walk out with hundreds of thousands of ballots. That’s unprecedented in California history.
Carl Luna, director of the Institute for Civil Civic Engagement at the University of San Diego, didn’t spare the group. In an email reviewed during reporting, Luna called them “the political equivalent of flat earthers who refuse to look at any facts that do not support their unsupportable views.” Luna said the group’s arguments about miscounted ballots rely on data that’s both flawed and incomplete, a view Riverside County’s top elections official shares.
Worth flagging. Bianco had endorsed Kiel when Kiel ran for the bench.
That detail sits uncomfortably alongside everything else. Bianco isn’t just a sheriff investigating an election dispute. He’s a Republican running for governor in 2026, and his handling of the 2025 election is already a central issue in that race. He seized the ballots while that campaign was underway. When asked why his team didn’t try to verify the activist group’s claims before going to court, Bianco was unapologetic. “Why not just get to the bottom of it and see what the difference in the numbers were?” Bianco said. And he pushed back on the suggestion that the process was improper. “We took the information to a judge, and the judge agreed; it’s really as simple as that,” he said.
It’s not that simple, according to people who’ve spent careers on probable cause standards. Under California law, investigators are generally expected to do independent verification before asking a judge to approve a search. That means corroborating tips, checking sources, doing the work. Experts who reviewed the affidavits after Wednesday’s unsealing said they raise real questions about whether that bar was actually cleared.
Cristine Soto DeBerry, a former prosecutor who now runs the nonprofit Prosecutors Alliance Action, was direct. “This entire course of conduct concerns me,” she told reporters. She argued that elections don’t just sit on the same shelf as routine criminal investigations. “Elections are a sacred institution in this country. We have not seen sheriffs seizing ballots in this country until 2026 and it is being done in a very casual, procedural manner instead of with the kind of care that I’d expect we would use around something so important.” She said her concern extends to Kiel, not just Bianco.
Some legal observers who reviewed the documents stopped short of calling Kiel’s decision indefensible. Judges routinely defer to law enforcement affidavits, and probable cause is a lower bar than proof. But the combination here, a gubernatorial candidate using his law enforcement authority to seize ballots, a sympathetic judge he’d once endorsed, an activist group as the sole factual basis, has drawn scrutiny that won’t be settled by a simple “the judge agreed.”
California’s 2026 governor’s race now has this seizure at its center. Bianco’s opponents aren’t letting it go. And the unsealing hasn’t closed questions. It’s opened them.