California’s Supreme Court justices appeared skeptical on Monday that Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco was acting within his legal rights when he seized more than 650,000 ballots from that county’s top election administrator in March.
In back-to-back hearings in downtown San Francisco, Bianco’s attorney, Bradley Hertz, argued that local law enforcement officers have the right to take ballots after obtaining a warrant, regardless of state laws detailing how election challenges, recalls and investigations should be handled. He also argued, in the second case, that California’s attorney general does not have the power to issue orders to county sheriffs like Bianco.
Deputies seized the ballots as part of Bianco’s investigation into alleged voter fraud in California’s November special election on redistricting after activists alleged the ballots were undercounted. Riverside’s registrar of voters has said repeatedly those claims were based on a basic misinterpretation of preliminary vote count data.
Bianco grabbed national headlines at a time he was mounting his ultimately unsuccessful bid for governor and amid President Donald Trump’s efforts to undermine faith in the outcome of the 2020 elections and nationalize election administration.
The ballot seizure drew two legal challenges, both of which the court considered.
At a news conference after the first oral argument, lawyers and advocates who sued Bianco were optimistic.
The case “is going to send a message around the country. That our election ballots are the voters’ ballots to be protected at all costs,” said Chad Dunn, with the UCLA Voting Rights Project, who argued the first case against Bianco. “We couldn’t be more satisfied with how the hearing went today.”
Bianco, speaking to reporters on the courthouse steps, said he hopes the court will rule his way anyway. He said if the court orders his office to return the ballots, he will comply, but suggested that his office would continue its investigation.
“I would expect that that’s what every Californian should expect,” he said.
The justices may not release a ruling for months.
Bianco’s argument ‘bizarre’ to one justice
The first lawsuit came from a handful of Riverside voters, including two local Democratic elected officials, who argue that state law makes it abundantly clear how ballots in contested elections should be handled — and this wasn’t it.
“The election code provides a process” for who, how and under what circumstances ballots should be handled, Dunn told the court. Any recount should take place in a public, transparent way, conducted by trained, properly sworn officials and initiated by a district attorney, county board of supervisors and the California secretary of state, he said.
State law does not permit simply “taking ballots into a back room” with “officers trying to assemble a vote-counting airplane while they’re flying it,” said Dunn.
Dunn’s legal argument focused on one California election law regarding recounts and criminal prosecutions into election results that says “In no event shall the (ballots) be taken from the custody of the elections official.”
Hertz countered that because Bianco obtained a warrant from a judge, the penal code applies instead. Bianco ultimately obtained three warrants from Riverside County Superior Court Judge Jay Kiel. Kiel is a political ally of Bianco’s.
Justice Kelli Evans appeared unpersuaded, noting that the language of the state election law is pretty straightforward. “So it’s ‘in some event,' despite the fact that it says ‘in no event?’” she asked with apparent skepticism.
Hertz also argued that the election code in question only applies to criminal prosecutions, not to the type of preliminary investigation Bianco was conducting.
But if that were true a sheriff could seize the ballots during an investigation, only to be forced to hand them back during prosecution, said Justice Goodwin Liu. “That seems bizarre.”
Direct supervisor or elder statesman?
Bianco’s argument in the second case didn’t fare much better.
The legal challenge Attorney General Rob Bonta brought focused on whether Bianco was required to abide by directions from the state attorney general, which ordered Bianco to hold off on executing the warrants in late February. Bianco ignored it. Bonta then ordered the sheriff not to do anything with them. Bianco’s office began counting the seized ballots and only stopped when ordered to do so by the state Supreme Court in April.
Bianco didn’t have the authority to do any of that, said California Solicitor General Sam Harbourt. The California constitution grants the attorney general “direct supervision” over sheriffs, which has been affirmed by the state Legislature. Though attorneys general have been loath to exercise such sweeping powers in the past for political reasons, the law is clear, said Harbourt.
Hertz argued that the authority apparently conferred on the attorney general was actually like that of an “elder statesman” — someone able to dispense advice and arguably step in when necessary action wasn’t being taken, but otherwise restricted from going further. He acknowledged that such a reading might seem “counterintuitive.”
Once again, the justices didn’t seem to be having it.
“It’s more than counterintuitive,” said Justice Joshua Groban. Terms like “direct supervision” have a clear, intuitive meaning, he said. He described a hypothetical conversation between a manager and a new employee to illustrate his point. “‘I’m your new supervisor, but funny thing, I don’t have any control over your actions,’” he said.
That line of questioning seemed to undercut more than just Bianco’s specific legal argument, but the entire “constitutional sheriff” movement with which Bianco has been associated. Members of the movement believe that elected sheriffs have the power to ignore laws they deem unconstitutional and have ultimate political authority within a given county.
The stakes for 2026
Bianco’s gambit was never going to alter the outcome of the November special election, even in Riverside County, where it passed with an 80,000 vote margin.
But many voting rights advocates see the dispute as an important test case for the 2026 midterm elections.
Trump has spent half a decade lobbing unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud and election irregularities to undermine public confidence in results that don’t go his way, this year seizing old ballots and other election records from officials in Fulton County, Georgia and Maricopa County, Arizona and seeking voter roll data from nearly every state.
At the press conference, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra, who advises the UCLA Voting Rights Project, tied the case to Trump’s proposed federal legislation to create a national voter ID requirement and to California’s Proposition 39 on this November’s ballot, which would do the same for the state.
“The assault on elections, the assault on voters’ rights, is real, it’s imminent,” he said.
The supporters of both lawsuits argue that the court must demand that Bianco give the ballots back to prevent Trump-aligned local law enforcement officials throughout California from seizing, auditing or otherwise interfering in local elections in ways and at times that could affect the outcome.
Justices Groban and Leondra Kruger pressed Hertz on whether, according to his argument, Bianco could have taken the ballots while votes were still being cast.
Hertz said that ballots are subject to “other protections” so close to Election Day. Upon further interrogation by the justices, he admitted that he did not know what those protections might be. “I don’t have them handy,” he said.
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
