Republican candidate for governor spars with AG Bonta over local election conspiracy

A Republican sheriff and candidate for governor’s unusual investigation into voter fraud took a bizarre turn Friday, when he accused California Attorney General Rob Bonta of interference and made statements that contradicted Riverside County officials in charge of managing elections and prosecuting crimes.

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, polling third in a crowded gubernatorial race in which the top two finishers in the June primary advance to the November general election, confirmed during a morning news conference that his office is investigating a local group’s claims that the November 2025 special election was skewed by more than 45,000 excess votes in Riverside County.

The Riverside Election Integrity Team, a group of right-leaning volunteers, arrived at its conclusion by comparing preliminary counts of ballots hand-logged by Riverside County elections officials and volunteers against the official machine totals used to verify ballots and process votes.

In a Feb. 10 presentation, Riverside County Registrar of Voters Art Tinoco refuted REIT’s approach as imprecise and misguided, as early hand totals are not intended to do much but snapshot the workload on Election Day.

His office runs two electronic systems – one for tabulating ballots, one for processing votes – to arrive at official counts. Those systems showed a difference between ballots received and votes counted to be 103, a 0.16% discrepancy that falls well under the state’s 2% margin of error for certifying results.

County officials said they’ve held multiple meetings with REIT to explain the group’s miscalculation but were unable to convince its members, who regularly agitate over the idea of widespread voter fraud and say they believe human counts over machine ones.

Bianco suggested the group would get its wish, saying his office secured a local judge’s order Thursday allowing his investigators to begin hand counting more than 650,000 ballots seized from elections officials.

He declined to provide a timeline for completing the investigation, but said the goal wasn’t to re-litigate Proposition 50, the successful statewide redistricting initiative that passed by more than 82,000 votes in Riverside County.

“I hope we can all agree – there is no acceptable error, small or large, in our elections, let alone a 45,000-vote difference,” said Bianco, who previously insisted he wouldn’t comment on the investigation until it was complete. “Our investigation will determine the validity of that alleged discrepancy and, if found true, we will determine the cause. We will do that by physically counting the ballots.”

There is already a civil process for requesting and conducting recounts, which would be performed by local elections personnel trained to do them, say elections officials and scholars.

Bianco also sharply criticized Secretary of State Shirley N. Weber, who previously said the sheriff’s actions “fall well outside of the law,” and Bonta, whom he called “an embarrassment to law enforcement.”

Bonta fired back hours later, accusing Bianco of “misleading statements” and providing redacted copies of communications that backed up his claim.

For instance, Bianco said Bonta sought to stop his investigation without reason.

A Feb. 26 letter from Bonta to Bianco asked for a one-week pause and expressed concerns that the sheriff had provided inaccurate and incomplete information to a judge to secure the search warrant that led to the seizure of “approximately 1,000 boxes of ballots and other materials from the Riverside County Registrar of Voters.”

“We are concerned that the affidavits identify no specific felony offenses you have probable cause to believe were committed, nor do they identify particular persons whom you have probable cause to believe committed any such offenses, as required by Penal Code sections 1524(a) (4) and 1525,” Bonta’s letter states. “There also appear to be omissions of material facts in the affidavit that may have substantially interfered with the magistrate’s inference-drawing process.”

In a follow-up email to the Chronicle, Bianco said that didn’t count as a valid reason, as “a judge had already completely disagreed with him.”

The threshold for determining probable cause isn’t particularly high, but it does require a law enforcement agency to articulate that an alleged crime occurred and identify a possible perpetrator, a California Department of Justice representative said.

Bianco admitted Friday that he wasn’t convinced a crime had taken place.

“It is basically a fact-finding mission,” he said.

Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt, a constitutional law and democracy scholar who previously investigated voting rights issues in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, said he had not seen Bianco’s news conference, but found the concerns raised in Bonta’s letter “significantly troublesome.”

“(I)n particular, the request for a week’s delay on an investigation where there’s no meaningful risk of spoilation in order to make sure that the warrants appropriately note probable cause seems to me like a reasonable request,” he said by email. “I’d still need a lot more information (including the warrant affidavits) to know whether there’s something particularly shady going on or not, but at least if the facts in Bonta’s letter are accurate, yeah, that would be disturbing.”

Bianco also said his office first began investigating alleged voter fraud back in 2022. And while he said the investigation remained ongoing, he both claimed that it had led to some prosecutions and that his office had found no evidence of widespread fraud.

“We have found isolated instances of ballot fraud, of voting for people that are dead, of voting for people that don’t live at the location,” he said. “We have referred cases to the District Attorney’s Office. Some of those are pending. Some of those have already been adjudicated. We have not found any mass fraud in Riverside County in elections.”

The Riverside County District Attorney’s Office previously told the Chronicle that Bianco’s office had never submitted an election-related case or complaint to it for prosecution.

Asked to clarify, Bianco said in his email that there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute the “one-offs … and understandably, the DA’s office did not accept any of them.”

The D.A.’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a statement, Bonta said his office had tried for weeks to understand the basis for Bianco’s investigation and that the sheriff had “delayed, stonewalled, and otherwise refused to work with us in good faith.”

“Sheriff Bianco’s investigation is unprecedented in both scope and scale – and appears not to be based on facts or evidence but on unfounded allegations that have already been refuted by the Riverside Registrar of Voters,” Bonta’s statement said.

Asked during the news conference how his campaign for the state’s highest office bears on his investigation into local elections, Bianco denied that it did.

“Let me make this perfectly clear – I’m the sheriff of Riverside County,” he said. “I couldn’t care less what I’m doing in another election and this has absolutely nothing to do with it.”

On Thursday evening, the sheriff’s official Facebook page promoted his news conference between posts about the governor’s race.

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