WASHINGTON, DC – MAY 15: Sheriff Chad Bianco of Riverside County speaks during a news conference at the U.S. Capitol on May 15, 2024 in Washington, DC. This week marks National Police Week, which sees thousands of police officers from departments across the country coming to Washington DC to honor law enforcement who died in the line of duty. (Photo by Kent Nishimura/Getty Images)
When Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco seized 650,000 ballots cast in California’s recent redistricting referendum, he opened a new front in the battle over the sanctity of election results.
His shocking actions came just weeks after the FBI raided a Georgia election hub to seize 2020 election ballots and subpoenaed files related to the 2020 vote in Arizona.
But whereas the FBI actions were clearly part of President Donald Trump’s efforts to relitigate his loss in the 2020 presidential race, the Riverside County ballot seizure begged more basic questions: Who is Chad Bianco, and why would a county sheriff want to challenge the results of a special election?
In fact, a closer look reveals that Bianco has a long history of hardline conservative statements and his ballot seizure fits clearly into the Republican Party’s broader attack on free and fair elections.
Who is Chad Bianco?
Beyond being the sheriff of Riverside County, which stretches from eastern Los Angeles to the Arizona border, Bianco is currently the leading GOP candidate for governor of California.
That has led his opponents to view his attack on the 2025 redistricting referendum as a campaign strategy. During that special election, California voters overwhelmingly approved a new Congressional map to offset Trump’s gerrymander gains in other states — particularly, in Texas.
But the seizure also stems from local anti-voting activism. Bianco took custody of the ballots as part of a criminal investigation based on a volunteer group’s claims of an enormous discrepancy between ballots cast and ballots counted in the referendum.
But it appears that the volunteers simply misunderstood the raw election data.
Bianco’s hardline history
Even prior to the ballot seizure, Bianco had a history of aggressive rhetoric and hardline positions.
Earlier this month, in his capacity as a gubernatorial candidate, Bianco explicitly threatened to dismantle California’s government.
“I am the antithesis to California state government,” he told reporters, “because I am going to take a nuclear bomb into that building and absolutely destroy everything that they do to us behind closed doors.”
Bianco has also been linked for years to far-right groups, including the extremist Oath Keepers militia and the “constitutional sheriffs” movement, which believes that local sheriffs have the supreme authority to interfere in elections.
While he denounced the Oath Keepers’ involvement in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Bianco has also defended the group, telling local media: “They stand for protecting the Constitution.”
He was also named the 2023 “Sheriff of the Year” by the Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank that trains sheriffs to battle “wokeness.”
Prior to that, Bianco made headlines in 2022 for appearing at a fundraiser with British anti-Muslim commentator Katie Hopkins.
After Bianco seized the Riverside County ballots, Democracy Docket found that he had made multiple statements on social media claiming that Democrats use illegal noncitizen voting and fraud to win elections. They echoed false claims made by Trump and other right-wing anti-voting activists.
“That’s why some people should never be allowed to vote,” Bianco posted on LinkedIn Wednesday in response to a video about the Iran war. He also commented that Democrats have “created an environment where cheating and illegal voting is keeping them in office.”
“Non citizens can vote, you can vote for someone else even if they are dead, people can vote multiple times with different names,” Bianco wrote in another post.
Legal fight
In a lawsuit filed earlier this week, Riverside County voters are demanding the return of the ballots. Beyond taking aim at Bianco, they also slammed the county’s voter registrar for handing over the ballots into the sheriff’s custody without exhausting legal options to block the search warrants.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) has said that the warrants “failed to meet even the most basic constitutional and statutory standards.”
Bianco obtained the warrants from Superior Court Judge Jay Kiel, whose social media posts proudly boast Bianco’s campaign endorsement.
In a podcast interview with Tim Thompson, an evangelical pastor who campaigned alongside Eric Trump to elect right-wing Christians to local school boards, Kiel praised Riverside County as a conservative outlier in the state.
“It’s the Texas of California,” he said.
But it’s not entirely conservative. Though some county officials have remained quiet about the controversial investigation, Riverside County Supervisor Jose Medina (D) immediately demanded Bianco return the ballots, telling him to find another campaign stunt.
Instead, Bianco has only doubled down on his partisan talking points.
“This isn’t about counting yes and no votes. This is simply counting the total ballots and comparing that total with the number of votes reported by the Dominion machines,” Bianco said in a social media video this week, drawing a link to the machines at the center of the FBI’s similarly conspiracy theory-fueled election raid in Georgia.
“What’s it going to be?” Bianco continued. “Let law enforcement count the ballots as part of a lawful investigation, or halt the investigation and sweep it under the rug?”
