California's Supreme Court has ruled unanimously that a county sheriff broke state election law by seizing more than 650,000 voted ballots, and broke it again by ignoring the attorney general's order to stop, in back-to-back decisions that draw a bright line around who controls ballots after an election.
In Bonta v. Bianco, the court held that the California Constitution gives Attorney General Rob Bonta binding supervisory authority over sheriffs in criminal investigations connected to the uniform enforcement of state law, and in the companion case that ballots must remain in the custody of elections officials even during a criminal investigation, according to the opinions as reported by CalMatters via KVCR and by the Riverside Record, which first reported the story.
Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco's detectives had seized roughly 1,000 boxes of vote-by-mail ballots from the November 2025 special election under search warrants, after a local watchdog group claimed a discrepancy of about 45,000 ballots between votes reported cast and votes counted. The court's answer was that California law provides recounts, audits and court-supervised mechanisms for exactly such claims, and none of them involves removing voted ballots from the registrar's custody.
Bianco, who earlier this year lost a bid for the Republican nomination for governor, said he was disappointed, would examine appeals and federal options, and maintained his investigation was lawful. Bonta said the rulings reaffirmed the attorney general's constitutional duty to supervise county law enforcement in the public interest.
The decisions land weeks before a midterm season in which election administration is already litigated state by state. Their practical holding travels: in California, a sheriff who doubts a count must use the election code's own tools, in the open, and the ballots stay where the law put them.
The registrar will regain custody of the seized ballots, and any challenge to the 2025 special election count must proceed through the election code's supervised mechanisms. The rulings also write the rule for the midterms now weeks away: in California, law enforcement suspicion, however sincerely held, does not move voted ballots out of official custody.
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