Exclusive: ‘Some people should never be allowed to vote’: California sheriff who seized ballots pushes extreme anti-voting rhetoric online
When Chad Bianco, the sheriff of California’s Riverside County, seized more than 650,000 ballots from the state’s 2025 redistricting referendum, it raised some big questions.
Why was a county sheriff investigating a state special election based upon a little-known activist group’s claims of a discrepancy between ballots cast and ballots counted?
A look at a LinkedIn profile in Bianco’s name may offer some clues.
“That’s why some people should never be allowed to vote,” the sheriff wrote Wednesday in response to a commentary video about the Iran war on the social media site.
It wasn’t an isolated comment. Over the past months, Bianco published numerous comments and posts on social media promoting false claims that elections are rigged and Democrats rely on illegal voters to win races.
In doing so, he has echoed narratives pushed by President Donald Trump and other MAGA-aligned GOP figures that have been repeatedly rejected by courts, election officials and audits across the country.
Bianco did not immediately reply to a request for comment on his social media posts.
Democrats have “created an environment where cheating and illegal voting is keeping them in office,” Bianco wrote in another comment.
“Why would they be scared if they aren’t illegal? Illegals shouldn’t be voting!,” he wrote in reply to warnings by voting rights advocates that placing immigration agents near polls would intimidate eligible voters.
Bianco has also pushed election denial rhetoric on social platform X.
“In-person voting with ID. The only votes it ‘suppresses’ are the dead voters, the fake voters, and the illegal voters,” he wrote in one post.
And in another post:
“Non citizens can vote, you can vote for someone else even if they are dead, people can vote multiple times with different names.”
There is no credible evidence of widespread voting by noncitizens, dead voters or coordinated multi-vote schemes — claims that have been repeatedly debunked.
Bianco’s remarks come as California officials are fighting in court to stop his seizure and hand recount of roughly 650,000 ballots from last November’s Proposition 50 special election, in which voters overwhelmingly backed a Democratic-leaning map that was drawn to counter GOP gerrymanders in other states. Bianco, who is running for governor, has framed his investigation as a straightforward effort to verify results.
A top Riverside County election official says otherwise. In comments to the local board of supervisors, registrar of voters Art Tinoco said the actual discrepancy between ballots cast and ballots counted was just 103 votes — roughly 0.016% of ballots — and that claims of a larger figure were based on activists misunderstanding raw, unprocessed election data.
California’s attorney general is also fighting back.
“The Sheriff’s actions — launching an unprecedented criminal investigation into the special election without identifying any particular crime that may have been committed by anyone, and openly defying the Attorney General’s lawful directives — demand immediate judicial intervention,” Attorney General Rob Bonta wrote in a court filing.
A state appeals court denied a petition by Bonta seeking to stop Bianco from conducting an “amateur” recount of the ballot he seized, because it should have been filed with a lower court.
Matthew Kupfer contributed reporting.
