seizure

The California Supreme Court excoriated Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco over his seizure of hundreds of thousands of Proposition 50 ballots earlier this year, ordering the former gubernatorial candidate to immediately hand over all remaining material in a pair of scathing decisions on Thursday.

“We hold that the seizure of the ballots was unlawful,” wrote Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero. “While allegations of election improprieties are a very serious matter, our Elections Code contains numerous established mechanisms for investigating and proving misconduct that do not compromise the integrity of voted ballots — contrary to the means employed here.”

The ruling comes less than two weeks before Californians will start casting ballots in the race for governor and a handful of hotly contested congressional midterms — nationally watched elections that would be vulnerable to similar interference unless the court gave clear orders, advocates warned at oral arguments last month.

“It’s bound to be repeated again,” said Chad W. Dunn of the UCLA Voting Rights Project, which led the first of two election interference suits against Bianco, a popular MAGA personality and former Republican candidate for governor.

Bianco has long flirted with President Trump’s election fraud conspiracy movement. Though the ballot seizures in February were widely seen as a campaign stunt, the legal theory behind them — that local lawmen can commandeer voter materials from elections officials, and that sheriffs are unanswerable to officials who outrank them, including attorneys general — belongs to a larger “constitutional sheriffs” ideology.

California‘s seven Supreme Court justices appeared by turns perplexed by and incredulous of those theories during oral arguments last month.

“You are walking into a very dense thicket of very specific laws that govern elections in particular and I think it’s a very established cannon of interpretation that the specific trumps the general,” Justice Goodwin H. Liu said.

The ballot battle emerged from a Riverside County pilot program meant to boost voter confidence, a handwritten tally that ultimately fell about 46,000 votes short of the official count, sparking claims of fraud.

Riverside County Registrar of Voters Art Tinoco met with the county board of supervisors and the citizens’ group behind the claim and carefully explained how the discrepancy emerged. Yet, Bianco pursued warrants to seize more than 650,000 ballots, alleging they were evidence in an investigation of wide-ranging election fraud.

When he learned of the warrants, California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta ordered Bianco to stand down. Instead, the sheriff accelerated his plans, dispatching armed deputies from Riverside County’s Special Investigations Bureau, Emergency Response Team and SWAT unit to sweep up the votes.

Later, Bianco directed his underlings to begin counting those ballots by hand — a potential felony under state law, which forbids anyone other than an election official from so much as touching a ballot container.

When Bonta again ordered him to stop, Bianco argued the attorney general had no authority to command him, later claiming in court that the law conferred only an “advise and consent” role.

In fact, California courts have spent more than a century delineating power between the state’s attorney general and local sheriffs and prosecutors. Voters took the matter a step further in 1934, endorsing a ballot initiative that clearly named the attorney general as California’s top law enforcement official, and put the state’s other lawmen beneath him.

In a footnote, justices also took a swipe at Bianco’s initial effort to have the case tossed for lack of standing — a move apparently undertaken on the legal advice of an elaborate artificial intelligence hallucination.

“In his preliminary briefing, Bianco challenged petitioners’ standing based on misquoted passages from, and an incorrect recitation of our holding in, Common Cause v. Board of Supervisors,” Guerrero wrote. “We disapprove of the improper use of artificial intelligence tools, which apparently contributed to the significant error that occurred here and remind counsel of attorneys’ professional duties of competence and candor to the court.”

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom on Saturday signed legislation to increase security for the state’s voting systems and protect Californians’ ability to cast ballots in an effort to guard against potential interference in the Nov. 3 election, including by the Trump administration.

Newsom pointed to the Trump administration’s recent effort to restrict mail-in voting through the U.S. Postal Service, which was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, and the presence of federal monitors at California polls last year as evidence that Trump “will continue his efforts to interfere with the November election.”

“Donald Trump won’t stop until he can exert dictatorial control over your free vote and disenfranchise millions of people this November. California will stop him at every opportunity,” Newsom said in a statement.”We have no bigger task than fighting to protect the right to vote from interference and meddling — the future of democracy is on the line. These bills today build upon the wall California has built to safeguard our electoral process.”

The governor signed the package of bills at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo, where a year earlier federal agents gathered outside a political rally he was hosting. Then Border Patrol Sector Chief Gregory Bovino, who had been leading the immigration operations in California, was among those outside the event, joined by agents in helmets, camouflage, masks and holding guns. Newsom described their presence as political intimidation.

One bill Newsom signed Saturday cites efforts to “weaponize law enforcement authority for political purposes,” including Republican “Sheriff Chad Bianco’s seizure of ballots in Riverside County,” and the election monitors sent by the U.S. Justice Department to polling sites in five counties during a 2025 special election on redistricting.

Such moves “have given rise to unprecedented concerns about law enforcement interference” in elections and “[demonstrate] that these threats are not merely hypothetical,” the bill by Sen. Tom Umberg (D-Santa Ana) reads.

The law, Senate Bill 884, which takes effect immediately, requires counties to open ballot drop-off locations 30 days before an election — two days earlier than usual — and allows counties to ban electioneering, or trying to influence voters’ decisions, within up to 200 feet of polling sites. It also bans police from making arrests near voting locations except for crimes against people, property, or disrupting the voting process.

Bianco, a GOP candidate for governor who placed fourth in the primary, drew swift condemnation and legal challenges this spring after he ordered deputies to seize more than 650,000 ballots from the Riverside County elections office. Voting rights groups and Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta challenged the move, which is being decided by the California Supreme Court.

Bianco carted off truckloads of ballots from the Riverside County Registrar of Voters in February after securing a warrant based on claims that the office allowed fraudulent votes in the special election to redraw California’s congressional districts under Proposition 50 in 2025.

Earlier this year, Newsom signed a bill preventing local and federal law enforcement agencies from taking ballots without a warrant.

On Saturday the Democratic governor signed a bill making it a felony to seize or order the seizure of ballots, election records or voting machines. Future seizures could be punishable by up to four years in prison.

“The federal administration and those seeking to spread lies about our democracy continue to call for interference in elections in ways we have never seen before in this country,” Assemblymember Gail Pellerin (D-Santa Cruz), the bill’s author and a former longtime county elections chief, said last month. “AB 282 helps ensure that every lawfully cast vote can be counted, and that the will of the voters of every political party will be respected.”

Republican lawmakers argued in previous hearings that the bill is unnecessary because it is already a crime to steal ballots.

Another bill, Senate Bill 259, makes it a crime to interfere with a mail ballot on the way to or from a voter or order the seizure of ballots that are in transit to a local elections office.

Newsom signed Assembly Bill 1664, which requires elections officials to immediately notify the attorney general and secretary of state immediately upon learning of any warrants, subpoenas or law enforcement investigations involving election records or voting equipment.

Newsom also signed bills to boost protections under the California Voting Rights Act, including an explicit ban on voter suppression and expanded access to election materials in languages other than English.

The governor also signed legislation to require more transparency from social media influencers who are paid by political campaigns. The measure, Assembly Bill 1130, came in the wake of a controversy in the June primary election when social media influencers took on a more visible role in the campaigns.

Candidates including Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer paid thousands of dollars to influencers who posted videos endorsing Steyer or talking about him in a positive light. These videos did not always disclose that influencers were paid by a candidate’s campaign.