The warrants behind Riverside County sheriff's ballot seizures were unsealed

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.