Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco ordered deputies to seize 47,000 mail-in ballots from the county registrar's office on Wednesday, claiming the ballots required "verification" under a county ordinance his office drafted and the Board of Supervisors approved in February. California Attorney General Rob Bonta obtained a temporary restraining order from a state judge on Thursday, but Bianco's office has not returned the ballots. A contempt hearing is scheduled for Monday. [1]

Bianco announced his candidacy for governor of California on Thursday evening, twelve hours after the seizure, on a platform built around what he calls "election integrity enforcement." His campaign website lists the ballot seizure as its first accomplishment. [1] [2]

The legal architecture is novel. Bianco's county ordinance requires the sheriff's department to "verify the chain of custody" of all mail-in ballots before they are counted — a function that California state law assigns exclusively to the registrar of voters, not to law enforcement. The ordinance was drafted by a legal team associated with True the Vote, the election integrity organization that has been developing county-level ballot challenges in eleven states since 2024. Riverside County is the test case. [2]

Attorney General Bonta called the seizure "an illegal act by a law enforcement officer who has decided that his authority supersedes the state constitution." Bianco responded on X: "The AG can file all the papers he wants. I have the ballots." The statement, which received 2.3 million views, captured the strategic logic: possession is the argument. By the time courts resolve the question, the ballots' chain of custody — the very thing Bianco claims to be protecting — will have been broken by his seizure of them. [1]

The governor's race is eighteen months away. The ballots are in a sheriff's evidence locker. The contempt hearing is Monday.

-- MAYA CALLOWAY, New York