Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco seized more than 650,000 ballots from last November’s special election amid a criminal probe into alleged vote-count irregularities tied to Proposition 50, setting off a political and legal clash with California officials.

Riverside County Sheriff and California gubernatorial candidate Chad Bianco announced the seizure of over 650,000 ballots from the November special election as part of a criminal investigation into possible vote-count issues. The action landed squarely in the national spotlight because Bianco is both the county’s top lawman and a prominent Republican candidate for governor.

The ballots in question were connected to Proposition 50, the measure that temporarily redrew California’s congressional districts in a way critics say favors Democrats. That change, and the move to seize physical ballots, immediately triggered a confrontation between local law enforcement and state officials.

Bianco has said his office uncovered signs that the county’s official tally may have been inflated by more than 45,000 votes, which prompted the warrants and the physical collection of ballots. That claim, whatever its ultimate resolution, is the foundation for the sheriff’s decision to count and compare paper ballots against recorded totals.

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, a leading Republican candidate for governor, has seized more than 650,000 ballots from last November’s election to determine, he says, whether they were fraudulently counted.

“This investigation is simple: Physically count the ballots and compare that result with the total votes recorded,” Bianco said at a news conference Friday.

The unusual probe drew a sharp rebuke from California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, who said in a statement that it is “unprecedented in both scope and scale” and appears “not to be based on facts or evidence.”

Critics, meanwhile, said Bianco’s ballot seizure is a threat to democracy and another attempt by Republican election deniers to disenfranchise voters.

“There is no indication, anywhere in the United States, of widespread voter fraud,” Bonta said. “Counts, recounts, hand counts, audits, and court cases all support this.”

According to Bonta’s office, Bianco’s department on Feb. 26 seized about 1,000 boxes of ballot materials in Riverside County related to the November election for Proposition 50, which temporarily redrew the state’s congressional districts to favor Democrats in response to partisan redistricting in Republican states, including Texas.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta has formally asked Bianco to pause further action until his office reviews the factual and legal basis for the investigation, questioning whether probable cause supported the warrants used. That request escalated the dispute into a legal tug-of-war over jurisdiction, procedure, and the proper role of a county sheriff in election matters.

Bianco framed the operation as a straightforward law enforcement task. He said he has “a duty to investigate alleged crime in Riverside County” and described the effort as a fact-finding mission rather than an attempt to relitigate the election outcome.

Proposition 50 redrew California’s congressional districts to favor Democrats in response to redistricting moves in red states, including Texas. The measure passed in Riverside County by over 80,000 votes, and it passed statewide with 64 percent of the vote. Bianco has said his goal is to verify that the reported vote totals match the physical ballots.

Riverside County election officials acknowledge a variance of only 103 votes, equivalent to about 0.016 percent of the total, and they attribute that gap to human error rather than fraud. Their position is that routine mistakes happen during large-scale ballot handling, and that audits and recounts are the tools for correcting those errors, not dramatic seizures.

California Secretary of State Shirley Weber criticized the sheriff’s actions, saying, “The Riverside County Sheriff’s Office has taken actions based on allegations that lack credible evidence and risk undermining public confidence in our elections.” She also argued that Bianco’s staff “are not elections officials, and they do not have expertise in election administration.”

Supporters of Bianco see the move differently, arguing that local law enforcement has a responsibility to pursue credible allegations of irregularities and to restore confidence by checking the paper record. From that perspective, even a small discrepancy invites scrutiny when the integrity of the process is at stake and when district lines have been changed by ballot measures.

The clash exposes broader tensions between county sheriffs, state legal authorities, and election administrators over who gets to decide how far an investigation should go. Republicans sympathetic to the sheriff view the episode as necessary oversight in a state where redistricting and election administration are widely contested political issues.

Legal fights are likely to follow as the parties sort out the validity of the warrants, the chain of custody for seized materials, and the scope of any authorized review. For now, the physical count Bianco seeks and the state’s objections make clear that this is more than a local story; it’s a test of procedures and trust in how votes are tallied and certified in California.