In summary
Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco says it’s coincidence he got a California ballot seizure warrant from a judge who praised him and whom he endorsed in 2022.
Riverside County Sheriff and Republican gubernatorial candidate Chad Bianco denied any wrongdoing after his office gained permission to seize and recount hundreds of thousands of ballots from a judge who has publicly praised him, calling it purely coincidental.
“It’s impossible to know who the duty judge is on that day,” he said in an interview Thursday, in which he defended his controversial investigation into alleged “irregularities” in the 2025 Proposition 50 election as akin to any other criminal probe. “It happened to be a particular judge.”
Bianco’s investigation and seizure of more than 600,000 ballots from the Riverside County registrar of voters last month has alarmed elections experts. Since Feb. 9, Bianco’s office has obtained three court-approved warrants allowing him to seize and count 1,000 boxes of ballots cast last November.
Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a court filing that Bianco seized 426 additional boxes of election materials this week.
A sheriff has never seized ballots en masse for a criminal investigation in state history, Bonta said in filings.
Bonta on Thursday filed his second lawsuit seeking to stop his effort; the UCLA Voter Rights Project and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra also filed a lawsuit in the state Supreme Court on behalf of four Riverside County voters, arguing that Bianco’s moves violate state laws governing who is allowed to handle and count votes.
Secretary of State Shirley Weber has also condemned the ballot seizures, particularly Bianco’s plan to have sheriff’s deputies who are not trained in elections administration re-count the ballots.
Bianco said Thursday he expects a judge to appoint a special monitor to oversee the count, which he hopes will take about a week to conduct.
Bianco’s move comes as the Trump administration continues pushing baseless claims of fraud in the 2020 election and mirrors the February FBI seizure of 2020 ballots cast in Fulton County, Georgia.
Bianco, a Trump supporter, is neck-and-neck with fellow Republican Steve Hilton for the lead in the governor’s race. Bonta and Weber, both Democrats, are also running for re-election.
Bianco has insisted his efforts are unrelated to his campaign and are not meant to re-litigate the outcome of the statewide special election, in which 56% of Riverside County voters approved Prop. 50, the Democratic ballot measure to gerrymander the state’s congressional districts.
Voter fraud remains rare
Voter fraud is rare in California and nationally, repeated studies have found. In Riverside County, Bianco has been probing the elections system since late 2022 and said he has “not found any mass fraud in Riverside County in elections.”
But earlier this year a local elections-related activist group called the Riverside Election Integrity Team claimed to Bianco’s office that elections officials had inflated the number of ballots counted.
Registrar of Voters Art Tinoco told county supervisors last month the group was relying on incomplete data about how many ballots were cast that did not include confidential, provisional and other ballots. Bianco on Thursday called the explanation “some excuse.”
Bonta’s first attempt to stop the recount failed on Tuesday when an appeals court rejected the case. That case revealed that the warrants allowing the ballot seizure were signed by Riverside Superior Court Judge Jay Kiel, whom Bianco endorsed when Kiel ran for the bench in 2022.
Kiel is a former Riverside County deputy district attorney who ran for judge on a slate with three other prosecutors. They were jointly endorsed by the local Republican Party, Bianco, law enforcement groups and Our Watch, a conservative group run by local pastor Tim Thompson aiming to “increase the influence of Judeo-Christian values” in government.
Bianco, who has also appeared in Our Watch videos and headlined a fundraiser for Thompson’s political spending committee, wrote on social media in 2022 that Kiel and his fellow prosecutors should be elected judges “to help rein in political activism destroying the justice system.”
In an interview with Thompson on Our Watch’s social media pages in 2022, Kiel praised his then-boss, District Attorney Mike Hestrin, and Bianco.
“The people of Riverside County, I don’t think sometimes they realize how fortunate they are,” Kiel said. “These two are unbelievable when it comes to enforcing the law. … We’re so fortunate to have Chad Bianco.”
The warrant requests were assigned to Kiel because he was the “duty judge” that day, said Kareem Gongora, a spokesperson for Riverside County Superior Court. Gongora declined to comment on Kiel’s ties to the sheriff. Kiel could not be reached for comment.
Typically California courts assign duty judges on a rotating schedule to consider warrant requests from police on any given day, and it’s common for prosecutors and law enforcement to know who is on duty, prosecutors in several other counties told CalMatters. Gongora would not say whether that schedule is circulated to law enforcement in Riverside County.
Bianco bristled when asked whether he knew Kiel was on duty on Feb. 9, the day his office obtained its first warrant, and when asked whether their endorsements of each other posed a conflict of interest. He said sheriff’s deputies never know which judge is on duty.
“This notion that I am corrupt because Democrats are corrupt, and they expect everyone is corrupt just like them, is absolutely false,” he said.
Warrants remain under seal
Jerry Fineman, a former Riverside County prosecutor who retired in 2021 and who now lives out of state, said prosecutors typically knew who the judge on duty was but deputies commonly walk into court without knowing. Fineman has worked with both Kiel and Bianco and said Kiel’s prior assignments as a prosecutor in narcotics cases indicate that he would be “very familiar with the legal requirements of a warrant.”
Bianco also refused to release the warrants. Under state statute, search warrants and the sworn statements police make with evidence supporting their investigation must be executed within 10 days of being issued, after which they become public records. But Kiel has ordered the warrants sealed, which judges can do in limited circumstances to protect confidential informants. Fineman said warrants are typically sealed so as not to alert a suspect of an investigation.
Bonta’s office has reviewed the statements and warrants and, in his lawsuits, argues they fail to establish enough evidence of any crimes to justify seizing the ballots.
“That’s all the more compelling reason that these warrant packages should be made public, that people should be able to see them themselves,” said David Loy, legal director of the First Amendment Coalition. “It should very much be the rule, not the exception, that warrant packages are open to the public.”
Bianco refused, despite the already public nature of the investigation, and said 90% of the warrants he’s obtained in his three-decade law enforcement career have been sealed. He chastised reporters for treating the investigation differently from “a domestic violence case, a murder case, a robbery case.”
“Don’t you act like this is out of the ordinary,” he said. “You all are making it political. We are doing the same thing we do every single day, and I’m not going to justify it to people that have no idea or who are making things up to make it look like we are doing something out of the ordinary, or illegal or hidden or anything else. This is normal law enforcement.”
Anat Rubin and Cayla Mihalovich contributed reporting.
via CalMatters https://ift.tt/wIQJioY
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