California media outlets demand access to secret warrants in sheriff’s ballot seizure case

CalMatters and a national consortium of news organizations Wednesday filed a motion in Riverside County court seeking public access to the warrants a judge approved allowing Sheriff Chad Bianco to seize hundreds of thousands of ballots for an unprecedented investigation into the outcome of the November 2025 special election.

The groups are also filing a separate petition with the California Supreme Court that also seeks to have the records unsealed.

A Riverside County judge had ordered the warrants sealed, along with the sworn statements Bianco’s deputies made to a judge justifying their request to seize more than 1,400 boxes of Proposition 50 election materials from the Riverside County Registrar of Voters.

Lawyers representing CalMatters along with The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Riverside Record, other newspapers and local television network affiliates filed a motion to unseal the warrants and the sworn statements.

The coalition argues that it’s vitally important for the records to be made public, since they’re central to a bitter dispute over election integrity between two powerful state officials: Bianco, who is running for governor as a Republican, and Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat who is running for re-election.

“The public should not be forced to navigate these competing allegations without the facts on which the investigation is based,” Jean-Paul Jassy, attorney for the news outlets, wrote in the motion. “Nor does the law require them to.”

Bianco obtained three warrants in February and March from Riverside County Judge Jay Kiel authorizing the sheriff’s office to begin seizing ballots and other election materials from Riverside County elections officials. Kiel, whom Bianco endorsed when he ran for the bench in 2022, sealed the warrants at the request of the sheriff’s office.

Bianco intended for his deputies to recount the more than 600,000 ballots cast in the county last year as part of an investigation over what a local activist group called discrepancies between the number of ballots cast and number tallied. The county’s top elections official, Art Tinoco, has rejected those claims and explained in February to the county’s Board of Supervisors that they were the result of the activist group using flawed and incomplete data.

The investigation and recount are on hold, Bianco said earlier this week, after Bonta and the UCLA Voting Rights Project filed several legal challenges seeking to halt them. Bonta had ordered Bianco to turn over the warrants and supporting statements. He said in his lawsuits that the sheriff had failed to allege a crime or provide enough cause to justify seizing the ballots, and accused Bianco of using the investigation as a campaign stunt.

Bonta’s office has refused to release those documents, citing the judge’s order sealing them.

Keeping them under seal has prevented the public from being able to scrutinize both politicians’ statements, in a hyper-partisan dispute ahead of a contentious election.

Bianco, in an interview last week, also refused CalMatters’ request for copies of the warrants.
“No, you’re not going to,” he said. “When (the investigation’s) over, like every other case that’s sealed, when it’s unsealed, you’ll get to see it. … Don’t you act like this is something out of the ordinary, because it is not.”

Under state law, police must execute warrants within 10 days of obtaining them, after which the documents and the police’s supporting statements must be made public. But it is common for law enforcement to ask for them to remain sealed during active criminal investigations.

In the ballot case, attorneys for the media outlets argue Bianco himself publicized the investigation during a press conference on March 20. They wrote that even if Bianco’s department had confidential information to protect, that does not justify Kiel’s sealing of all the records.

“It is hard to imagine a stronger public interest,” Jassy wrote, than “access to a proceeding purporting to resolve allegations relating to election integrity — allegations at the heart of our democracy.”

The case reached the state Supreme Court after Bonta filed an emergency petition seeking to halt Bianco’s ballot-seizure investigation. A lower court ruled Bianco’s investigation could proceed.

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