Secret warrants obtained by the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department to seize more than 650,000 ballots in a controversial investigation of election fraud allegations were made public Wednesday, raising new questions about whether the probe was based on solid evidence of crimes.
Riverside County Superior Court Judge Gail O’Rane on Tuesday ordered the warrants unsealed after several media organizations, including The Times, sued to review the documents. The release of the documents came soon after the California Supreme Court halted the investigation pending a further review of the case.
Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, also a Republican gubernatorial candidate, has championed the election fraud investigation and ballot seizure, which has drawn widespread criticism and several legal challenges, including from California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta. Bonta had requested the intervention from the state Supreme Court.
The warrants provide the first glimpse into the contested court documents related to the allegations of fraud — claims that election officials say are unfounded. They do not, however, identify a specific scenario or person who carried out a specific instance of voter fraud. Riverside officials had previously sought to keep the documents secret, citing an active investigation in response to records requests.
The three search warrants, which were signed by a county judge, were requested by Riverside County Sheriff’s Investigator Robert Castellanos. He said the election materials were needed to “prove or disprove any criminal conduct” from the 2025 election, citing an audit from the Riverside County Election Integrity Team that purported a major miscount of ballots.
Castellanos identified himself as a 21-year veteran of the department with previous experience investigating claims of voter fraud for the department. The warrants detailed the seizure of more than 1,000 boxes of ballots in February and March. They still didn’t provide an exact figure for the number of ballots seized, but the March warrant says that deputies went through 22 boxes which contained 12,561 ballots.
Bonta had previously said his office found “deficiencies” in the warrants that justified a halt to the investigation and execution of the warrants, according to court filings. Bonta said that “the affidavits did not identify any specific felony offense the sheriff had probable cause to believe had been committed or that a particular person had committed a felony.”
David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research and a former senior trial attorney overseeing voting enforcement for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, echoed some of Bonta’s concerns, calling the probable cause in the warrants “incredibly thin.”
“For a warrant, you need to establish probable cause that a crime has been committed and there’s evidence that you need to seize related to that crime,” Becker said after reviewing the newly released documents.
“This is the same conspiracy theory-fueled stuff that we’ve seen elsewhere,” Becker said. “It’s really unfortunate to see law enforcement officers fall victim to these same easily disprovable conspiracy theories and then misuse the warrant process with very flimsy claims before a friendly judge in order to seize materials that were already transparent and reviewed multiple times.”
While Bianco initially proceeded with the investigation against Bonta’s request to stop, he recently suspended the probe pending legal reviews. Bianco is a vocal supporter of President Trump, who has, for years, promoted conspiracy theories casting doubt on the nation’s election process, especially mail-in and early voting. Trump this week endorsed another GOP candidate for California governor, conservative commentator Steve Hilton.
The California Supreme Court on Wednesday granted Bonta’s request for a stay in the investigation and ordered all parties to “pause the investigation into the November 2025 special election and preserve all seized items.” The court also agreed to hear a review of the case in the coming weeks.
Bonta argued that the formal court order was necessary because “what the sheriff says and what he does are often two different things.”
“Today’s decision by the California Supreme Court reins in the destabilizing actions of a rogue sheriff, prohibiting him from continuing this investigation while our litigation continues,” Bonta said in a prepared statement. He called the ruling a “necessary and appropriate response to what is clearly an unprecedented situation.”
The attorney general has argued that the sheriff illegally defied directives from his office and proceeded with a case that “will only sow distrust in our elections.”
Bianco, in a video posted on social media Wednesday, said he was “very happy” with the Supreme Court’s ruling, though he acknowledged it means that the investigation remains in “status quo … at the hold of a court.”
The sheriff said he was “very confident they will allow us to continue with this investigation despite the attorney general’s attempts to cover it up. … We will make sure this investigation, like any investigation, is completed, and not swept under the rug.”
Bonta’s office had filed for the Supreme Court review after its petition with California’s 4th District Court of Appeal was denied last month, prompting the attorney general to file new petitions in both Riverside County Superior Court and the state’s highest court. Both remain ongoing.
The UCLA Voting Rights Project has also filed a petition to the California Supreme Court arguing that all ballots must remain in the custody of the county registrar of voters under state law.
The ballots in question are from the November election for Proposition 50, which has temporarily redrawn the state’s congressional districts to favor Democrats in response to partisan redistricting in Republican states, including Texas. After doing its own audit from the election, a local citizens group has claimed the county’s tally was falsely inflated by more than 45,000 votes. Bianco has said he wants to “determine the validity” of that claim.
But voting fraud remains rare across the U.S., and officials with the Riverside County registrar of voters have emphatically rejected any claims of voter fraud. In a lengthy, public presentation, Registrar of Voters Art Tinoco explained that the group’s allegations were inaccurate, based on a misunderstanding of raw data that had not been fully processed.
The actual discrepancy, Tinoco said, was 103 votes — a variance of 0.016%.
California law requires county officials to keep election materials sealed for 22 months for elections involving a federal office and for six months for all other contests.
The Proposition 50 election took place on Nov. 4, so the ballots are scheduled to be destroyed in May.
