The Brief

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco’s investigators had no insider tipsters, no witnesses and no independent analyses from forensic experts when they approached a local judge and asked to take the unprecedented step of seizing hundreds of thousands of ballots.

Instead, the evidence they showed Judge Jay Kiel were claims from a group that one independent elections expert described as the equivalent of “flat earthers” alleging possible voter fraud. The county’s top elections official says their claims of miscounted ballots are based on flawed and incomplete data.

Kiel, whom Bianco endorsed when he was running for the bench, signed the search warrants anyway, allowing the sheriff to take the highly unusual step of seizing 650,000 ballots from California’s 2025 election amid his own campaign for governor.

Until this week, the warrants were secret with Bianco, a Republican, contending they reflected “normal law enforcement” and Kiel keeping them under seal.

That changed Wednesday when a different Riverside County judge and the California Supreme Court ordered them opened after CalMatters and other news organizations petitioned for their disclosure.

After reviewing the documents, experts had mixed opinions on whether Bianco’s investigators had enough evidence of probable cause to justify the raid. Some said the lack of evidence in the investigators’ affidavits raises troubling questions about how easy it was for Bianco to seize the ballots with the appearance of judicial oversight.

Bianco said he didn’t care what independent experts had to say about his investigators’ warrants, and he blamed the media and California Attorney General Rob Bonta for trying to politicize the sheriff’s investigation.

“We took the information to a judge, and the judge agreed; it's really as simple as that,” he said. “Why not just get to the bottom of it and see what the difference in the numbers were?”

Cristine Soto DeBerry, a former prosecutor who heads the nonprofit Prosecutors Alliance Action, said she was troubled by how much the sheriff relied on an activist group’s claims without trying to first verify them before obtaining the warrants.

“This entire course of conduct concerns me,” said Soto DeBerry, whose group advocates for criminal justice reform. “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. And I think that applies to everybody who was involved here.”

Carl Luna, director of the Institute for Civil Civic Engagement at the University of San Diego, criticized the citizens’ group that deputies cited in the warrants and questioned Bianco’s integrity.

“They are the political equivalent of flat earthers who refuse to look at any facts that do not support their unsupportable views,” said Luna in an email to CalMatters. “The fact that Sheriff Bianco, an elected representative of the people of Riverside County, is using this group’s baseless allegations of fraud as what amounts to a campaign stunt is … evidence to question his fitness to lead the state.”

But Paul Pfingst, a former San Diego County district attorney and the former president of the California District Attorneys Association, said he thought the information presented in the affidavits was enough to meet probable cause.

“I think it exceeds it by a lot,” he said, pointing to the court paperwork, which says the county registrar of voters had not answered questions from an activist.

“In the absence of an explanation by the registrar of voters,” said Pfingst, “and unless someone can explain how … such a large discrepancy could occur, it is reasonable for law enforcement to determine whether the discrepancy is the result of electoral fraud or ballot fraud.”

Pfingst said it wasn't necessary for investigators from the sheriff’s department to get an explanation from county election officials before seeking the warrants.

Art Tinoco, the county’s registrar of voters, publicly rejected the activist group’s claims. He told county supervisors on Feb. 10 – before Kiel signed the last two of the warrants – that the activist group making the allegations didn’t understand the data they were looking through.

“Did the Nov. 4, 2025, statewide special election have a 45,896-ballot discrepancy between ballots cast and ballots counted?” Tinoco told the supervisors, according to the Riverside Press Enterprise. “The answer to that is no.”

CalMatters requested an interview with Tinoco on Thursday. County Chief Executive Officer Jeff Van Wagenen responded with a statement saying that no county officials would comment due to the pending litigation.

A spokesperson for Riverside County Superior Court said Kiel couldn’t comment due to rules prohibiting judges from discussing pending cases.

Court halted Bianco's investigation

The search warrants were unsealed on Wednesday, the same day that the California Supreme Court halted Bianco’s ballot investigation, which he previously characterized as a “fact-finding mission” intended “just as much to prove the election is accurate as it is to show otherwise.”

That ruling was in response to legal challenges from Bonta and UCLA Voting Rights Project contesting the seizure and recount.

In lawsuits, Bonta argued that Bianco failed to show that probable cause or evidence of a crime existed — a step that’s required to obtain a search warrant. He called it an attempt to undermine public confidence in elections.

Bonta’s office responded to an interview request Thursday with an emailed statement saying the office is working to “prevent the misuse of criminal investigative tools for partisan fishing expeditions.”

“Our focus is on the sheriff’s responsibilities under the law — to provide sufficient evidence of probable cause in obtaining criminal search warrants, to allow (the) Riverside (registrar of voters) to retain physical custody of the ballots as required by the elections code, and to follow the Attorney General’s lawful directives, all of which he failed to do,” the email read.

Claims from outside group

The newly released records show that the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department was in contact with a citizens’ group that believed they found possible voter fraud after surfacing a roughly 46,000-vote discrepancy between the number of ballots cast versus the number ballots certified, according to Riverside County Sheriff Department investigator Robert Castellanos in a sworn affidavit.

The last of the three warrants Kiel signed was filed on March 19, roughly three weeks after the state Justice Department ordered the Riverside County Sheriff Department to pause its work and share any information that could substantiate its concerns. By that point, the sheriff’s department had already recounted 12,561 ballots, according to Castellanos’s affidavit.

Castellanos’s affidavits do not have a signature from a prosecutor at the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office, suggesting prosecutors may not have reviewed the sheriff’s office warrant requests. It’s a common practice in California for a deputy district attorney to review local law enforcement search warrants to ensure investigators are on sound legal footing before presenting their evidence to a judge. The DA’s office didn’t return a message from CalMatters Thursday.

In an interview, Greg Langworthy said he wasn’t a conspiracy theorist and insisted his group, which calls itself the Riverside County Election Integrity Team, found enough evidence of vote-count discrepancies to warrant further investigation based on the registrar of voters’ own records.

“There’s no doubt that there is a discrepancy, and that's supported by his own records,” he said. “That’s why we say the sheriff is duty bound to investigate. I think all of them are duty bound to investigate.”

Allegations of voter fraud in Trump era

Groups like Langworthy’s are increasingly common, as President Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again movement spread unfounded allegations of rampant voter fraud.

Across the country, there’s been “an increasing appetite for seizing materials for the sake of simply seizing materials,” said Stephen Richer, the Republican former elected recorder of Maricopa County, Arizona. Richer was running his county’s elections office in 2020, when Trump falsely accused him of overseeing a “rigged election,” leading to death threats.

“I have a lot of experience with independent election fraud hunters and they almost universally have no experience in election administration,” he said. “I think it’s also important when ethically and responsibly submitting an affidavit for probable cause that you assess the credibility of the witnesses.”

Leonard Moty, a former Redding police chief and Republican supervisor in Shasta County where similar allegations of election impropriety have become common, described the warrants as “pretty light” after reviewing them at CalMatters’ request.

He said he would have liked to have seen a more specific allegation with supporting evidence in the warrant before taking the matter to a judge.

Instead, the warrants focused on allegations from activists.

“Statements don’t really mean much, particularly with this issue where on both sides people are saying what they want to say,” Moty said. “I would have wanted to see some actual evidence of votes not being counted.”

State Sen. Tom Umberg, a Democrat from Santa Ana who used to be a federal prosecutor, also reviewed the warrants at CalMatters request.

He said he’d never seen warrants before that didn’t identify a specific law investigators suspected may have been broken, nor did they present evidence that investigators had verified the reliability of the group making the allegations.

After reading the warrants, Umberg said he was considering writing legislation “to make sure that elections are not interfered with, that ballots are not seized based on some conspiracy theory.”

“This election is going to be a test of our democracy,” Umberg said. “And if it doesn't go the way the president thinks it should go, I am gravely concerned that he will use whatever levers of power he has, federally as well as locally, to undermine that election.”

Cayla Mihalovich is a California Local News fellow.

CalMatters Deputy Editor Adam Ashton contributed to this story.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Dan Shimell, an attorney and a new face in local politics, is Santa Ana’s next mayor after a shocking win against incumbent Valerie Amezcua. His win has become one of the most surprising upsets in Orange County’s general election and marks a shift for a city that previously elected its first Latina mayor.

Amezcua congratulated Shimell on social media late Monday night after the last round of election results nearly doubled Shimell’s lead. As of Tuesday night, Shimell held a 5-point lead over Amezcua. Amezcua did not respond to LAist’s requests for comment.

“It has been the honor of my life to serve the people of Santa Ana,” Amezcua said in a post. “Together, we have accomplished great things. We invested in our neighborhoods, expanded opportunity for families, and strengthened the services that make Santa Ana home. Our work was never about one person. It was about all of us moving this community forward.”

Aside from Shimell, progressives Sandra de Anda and Isuri S. Ramos are also projected to win City Council seats, deepening the Santa Ana City Council’s progressive bench.

A flashpoint in Amezcua’s re-election campaign was during the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids that rattled much of Southern California, including Santa Ana, Orange County’s only sanctuary city. The raids sparked protests that drew a heavy law enforcement response from Santa Ana police, including rubber bullets and tear gas.

In Amezcua’s first public response, she accused protesters of inciting chaos and violence. She later walked back her comments in a city statement, saying most protesters were demonstrating peacefully and that she did not support the raids.

Shimell told LAist he thinks Santa Ana voters, especially young and first-time voters, went to the polls to vote for those who can't.

“Those who have been or might in the future be impacted by immigration policy and enforcement,” Shimell added. “Taking a bold stance on immigration and police accountability seemed to resonate with voters I spoke with, and stood in stark contrast to the [police]-backed candidates who remained largely silent on those issues.”

What does this say about Santa Ana politics? 

Orange County Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento served as mayor of the city from 2020 to 2022, and his current district includes Santa Ana. Sarmiento told LAist that the results were surprising but reflected the change voters want to see in their elected officials.

“I think the underlying message is that money and establishment conventional politics no longer is the formula to success in a campaign in the city,” Sarmiento said. “It's really the influence of people and voters over money. That's really the theme here.”

Santa Ana City Councilmember Thai Viet Phan told LAist that the race results were somewhat surprising — but spoke to a larger trend.

“[In] the election results throughout the country … you saw a very leftward shift, with not just candidates but also just how voters voted,” Phan said. “I think that was reflected here in Santa Ana on the council.”

Amezcua outspent Shimell — by a lot

Shimell raised about $28,500 in his campaign for mayor. Amezcua raised more than $75,000 and received more than $200,000 in outside support — more than half of that came from the Santa Ana Police Officers Association.

Mike Moodian, a public policy professor at Chapman University, told LAist that in many ways, the races capture the zeitgeist of Santa Ana.

“Here we saw that there was a police union-backed group, and there was a resistance to that,” Moodian said. “People might have seen the incumbent mayor as part of a police union-backed establishment."

He explained that voters may have looked at Shimell as a fresh face who can represent more people and that the city is experiencing a deeper progressive shift.

“I find the residents of Santa Ana tend to be much more involved and engaged in local politics than most other cities in Orange County. So you also have a well-informed, engaged citizenry that showed up, and the voices were heard in Santa Ana,” Moodian said.

Moodian said Amezcua may have lost support from some voters because they were unsatisfied with her response to immigration enforcement.

What’s next?

Ballots are still being counted. The OC Registrar of Voters posts updates every day, except Sundays, at 5 p.m. Election results will be certified by Dec. 3. You can find updates on key measures and other races here.

For seven years, Nazmul Chaudhry has been trying to get the city of Los Angeles to fix a broken sidewalk in front of his store.

Chaudhry owns Deshi Food, a restaurant and grocery store in Little Bangladesh. Before I could even begin our interview, he led me to the front of his store to show me the sidewalk that pedestrians sidestep and electric scooter riders slow down around.

He said he’s tried to get the attention of city officials, but nothing has been done.

The broken sidewalk in front of Nazmul Chaudhry's shop in Little Bangladesh.

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Yusra Farzan

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LAist

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He’s hoping that will soon change. He said then-candidate Nithya Raman spent time in the historic enclave just north of Koreatown this fall, talking with community members about their problems. For the first time since he moved to the United States in 1989, Chaudhry is excited about a mayoral election.

“Everybody's happy because we've never seen anyone [come] like that directly to us,” Chaudhry said.

Mayor-elect Raman is of Indian descent and an immigrant. When she takes office, she will be the first South Asian mayor of Los Angeles. Chaudhry is proud of that distinction. But what means more to him is that Raman spent time walking the streets of Little Bangladesh, visiting businesses and speaking to community members about their concerns. Chaudhry said that, because of that, he asked all his customers and family members to vote for Raman. At dinner parties, Chaudhry said, Bengalis would share how they were excited to vote for Raman in this election.

Nazmul Chaudhry and one of his customers, Mohamed Hassen. They both voted for Nithya Raman for mayor.

In the Little Bangladesh area, vote returns to date show Raman with a 2-to-1 margin over Mayor Karen Bass.

 "Hopefully she's gonna take care of the city," Chaudhry said.

His business has been hit hard after federal immigration raids ramped up in Southern California. People are afraid to leave their homes for fear of being taken by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And for those who do come to his store, he said, they are met with increased prices because of tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump's administration on imported goods.

Nazmul Chaudry offers a lunch buffet at his restaurant but he has seen a drop in foot traffic after ICE raids ramped up.

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Yusra Farzan

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LAist

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"Everybody's suffering actually these days," Chaudhry said. “If you see, Nov. 3 is a huge change because people [are] fed up."

Chaudhry also said city services don’t do a good job keeping the streets clean. So he takes it upon himself to pick up trash in front of his shop.

A few weeks before Election Day, Raman posted a social media video from Little Bangladesh addressing the trash along the street.

His relatives in New York told Chaudhry that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, also of Indian descent, has “changed the whole city.” He’s hoping for some of that change in Los Angeles when Raman takes office in December.

Shift away from identity politics

While Raman’s Indian background was a feature of her campaign, it was “not the central thesis,” said Sara Sadhwani,  an associate professor of politics at Pomona College and a senior researcher with AAPI Data.

In 2020, when Kamala Harris, also of Indian descent, was running for vice president, Sadhwani said, she conducted research on Indian Americans who wanted to see more representation in politics. In 2024, some of them turned away from Harris.

“When the economy is bad, identity slips away as the top issue on someone's mind,” she said.

Identity politics, Sadhwani said, was important in 2008 when the nation elected the first Black president, Barack Obama.

Los Angeles mayor-elect Nithya Raman poses for a photograph with family members after casting her vote on Election Day during the midterm elections at the Silverlake Community Church.

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Frederic J. Brown

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AFP via Getty Images

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“ We're ushering in a new political generation of millennials and Gen Z; diversity is just expected at this point amongst a vast majority of Americans,” she said, highlighting how at the last census more people identified as multiracial.

Nationally too, Sadhwani said, thec ountry is seeing a shift. South Asians have gone from “model minority” to “governing minority.”

”The old script was that for Indian Americans, for South Asians, that being that quiet professional is what success meant,” she said. “When we look at Raman and also Mamdani, they're fighting for executive power in very visible, very messy city politics, and they won not by following the rules, but they won by challenging the status quo.”

South Asians as a political force

That idea resonates with Faizah Malik, managing attorney for housing justice at Public Counsel and a former L.A. City Council candidate.

“When we were growing up, our parents said, ‘Just keep your head down, go to school, get educated, make a nice life for your family, and that's it,’” she said. “Politics was not really part of the conversation, but I think what we're seeing is that we can run for office, we can win by being our full selves.”

This is an exciting time, she said, for “South Asian political empowerment,” with Raman set to join Mamdani in leading the country’s two largest cities.

Malik said that, as a housing advocate, she cares about Raman’s fight “to build more housing around the city that people can afford, her fight to keep renters in their homes, to prevent homelessness, her fight to try and really solve our homelessness crisis but also be efficient with our public dollars.”

Nikita Chaudhry, an actor and political organizer, wants to see Raman revitalize L.A.’s film industry, “to call the city the home of Hollywood again.”

“Having that kind of representation and knowing that it exists is really exciting because I think and hope it will activate South Asian Americans of all ages to get more involved in their communities,” Chaudhry said.

Raman's and Mamdani’s victories were years in the making, Chaudhry said: from organizing in their communities to holding other elected positions to engaging voters who are otherwise ignored by elected officials. And she hopes that it will inspire other South Asians to become more involved in their communities.

“If you're feeling activated, if you're feeling excited, that's great," she said. "Take that energy and the time and the skills and the specificity of what fires you up towards your local organization, towards your neighborhood, towards your community.”

As the race to represent L.A.’s Council District 9 remains too close to call, candidate Estuardo Mazariegos’ campaign has accused the campaign of Jose Ugarte, the front-runner, of potential ballot tampering.

The Mazariegos campaign made the accusations Monday, saying it had filed a complaint with the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk. In a press release, the campaign alleged that representatives for the Ugarte campaign had collected voters’ ballots to drop off without signing the appropriate line identifying the individual who returned the ballot.

In one case, Mazariegos’ team accused Ugarte campaigners of filling out a ballot on a voter’s behalf without her knowledge of who she was voting for.

“Taking people’s ballots, filling them out, and not following legal voter assistance guidelines in a district that has faced so much disenfranchisement is disgusting,” Mazariegos said in a statement.

Mike Sanchez, a spokesperson for the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk, said his office had forwarded the news release to the district attorney for review. He also pointed to the California Elections Code, which says that a “ballot shall not be disqualified solely because the person authorized to return it did not provide on the identification envelope their name or signature.”

Under California law, a voter can authorize another person to return their mail-in ballot — an approach also called ballot harvesting.

Justin Levitt, a  professor of constitutional law at Loyola Marymount University, told AirTalk Tuesday that there is no legal limit on the number of ballots an individual can turn in on others’ behalf, so long as they aren’t being compensated per ballot returned.

“Even if there were some sort of administrative wrongdoing, as long as there's no indication of fraud with the ballot itself, those ballots will all be counted,” he said.

Levitt said, however, that signing a ballot and then handing it to someone else to fill out would be illegal.

“ To the extent that there are allegations now that the DA may investigate, I suspect that's what they'll be focusing on,” Levitt continued.

The Mazariegos campaign also sent a collection of photos to the press, including one of a campaigner, USC student Amir King, returning a stack of ballots at a ballot drop box.

The Mazariegos campaign alleged that representatives for the Ugarte campaign had collected voters’ ballots to drop off without signing the appropriate line identifying the individual who returned the ballot.

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Courtesy of Estuardo Mazariegos' Campaign

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Ugarte’s campaign responded to the accusations by pointing to a post by King on Instagram in which he accused the Mazariegos campaign of bullying him and making false claims about him.

“Why is he attacking me? For participating in our democracy, as is my right under California state law and for helping others participate in democracy, as is their right under California state law,” King said in the post.

As of Tuesday morning, just under 300 ballots separate Ugarte and Mazariegos, with 44,000 ballots left to count in L.A. County. It’s not clear how many ballots in Council District 9 are left to count.