Over the past few weeks, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco — who is also a Republican candidate for governor of California — has taken the unusual step of seizing ballots from a recent election, launching his own recount, and opening a criminal investigation into how the election was run.

"This investigation is simple: Physically count the ballots and compare that result with the total votes reported," Bianco said during a press conference after he and his deputies seized the ballots last month.

The premise of Bianco’s investigation is sharply disputed. Bianco has pointed to the claims of a conservative citizens’ activist group that says it found an apparent discrepancy of tens of thousands of ballots — a figure election officials and independent experts say stems from a misreading of preliminary vote data, not an actual gap between ballots cast and ballots counted.

California’s attorney general moved to stop the investigation, which is now on pause. Bianco seized more ballots, anyway, and says the effort to stop his recount is “politically motivated.” Courts this week ordered the unsealing of the warrants used to justify the seizures, which showed a yearslong relationship between Bianco’s office and the conservative activist group. On Wednesday, the California Supreme Court also ordered a halt to Bianco’s investigation.

And the ripples may be spreading beyond California. Bianco told USA Today last week that the publicity has prompted law enforcement officials around the country to contact him because they’re interested in conducting similar election investigations. 

As the president has called for Republicans to “nationalize the voting,” a lot of people right now are worried about the possibility of federal intervention in the midterm elections — in no small part due to the administration’s efforts to seize election materials from across the country. But Blanco’s efforts raise different questions. 

Local actions like those in Riverside can move with a speed and force that federal interventions rarely match, and their consequences can cut closer to the machinery of elections itself.

Elections in the U.S. are run locally. So is law enforcement. That overlap creates a real vulnerability. The same county responsible for storing and counting ballots is also overseen by a sheriff who can get a warrant, enter election facilities, and take materials as part of a criminal investigation. In contrast, federal authorities seeking to obtain election materials have to establish jurisdiction and work through multiple layers of oversight. A local sheriff can act much more quickly, often before state officials or courts have time to respond.

Bianco, for example, used a standard criminal process. After opening a fraud investigation, his office got search warrants from a local judge and sent his own deputies to the county registrar to take custody of the ballots, just as they would in seizing evidence for any other criminal case. Within weeks of a complaint, hundreds of thousands of ballots were in law enforcement hands, and the same law enforcement agents began a recount.

Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said those differences can sometimes cut the other way — as they have, at least in part, in California. There, the attorney general has been able to intervene quickly, ordering Bianco to halt his investigation and filing multiple legal challenges that prompted Bianco to pause the effort while courts sort out whether it was lawful. In California, Levitt said, the attorney general has more authority over local law enforcement than you might find elsewhere. 

Still, that’s a different path than federal officials followed when they seized 2020 ballots from Fulton County, Georgia, in January. Federal authorities had to build a case, coordinate with prosecutors, and get approval through several layers of Justice Department and judicial review before initiating the seizure. While critics of the Trump administration say review has become a formality, it’s a formality that still takes a lot of time. And while Bianco got right to work on a recount, it’s still unclear exactly what the DOJ intends to do with Fulton County’s ballots. 

Joshua Douglas, a professor at the University of Kentucky specializing in election law, said that despite Riverside’s presence in the news, interference by local law enforcement in local election administration remains rare. Even in Northern California’s Shasta County, which has been consumed by fights over election administration for years, the sheriff has remained completely uninvolved.

“In the routine aspect of election administration,” Douglas said, law enforcement would only be involved “after the fact, when there were specific allegations of wrongdoing at the polls” by those qualified to make such assessments.  In Riverside, by contrast, Bianco has pointed to disputed claims about vote totals — raised by a citizens group and rejected by election officials — rather than any verified evidence or specific allegation of criminal conduct to justify opening an investigation.

Some law enforcement offices have fraud hotlines, which have been popular for decades, but rarely turn up anything. Other times they’ll investigate after specifically being asked to by the elections office or the local district attorney. Typically, Douglas said, that’s “good for confidence in the system — because most often something is investigated because of an accusation, but nothing nefarious actually happened.”

The investigation in Riverside, he notes, is proceeding on a fundamentally different track. And while that’s concerning, he doesn’t expect that other law enforcement offices will act in the same way.

Lots of things make Riverside a special case. Chiefly, Bianco’s candidacy for governor raises an obvious question of self-interest — he may be using the powers of his office to elevate a political issue that he thinks will benefit him as a candidate. He is also stepping into the administration of the same election system he wants to compete in — a personal conflict many have long complained about in relation to secretaries of state who run for office during their tenures.

But the political upside he appeared to be chasing has proven more limited than it first seemed.

Former President Donald Trump, whose backing could have consolidated Republican support behind Bianco, instead endorsed his opponent, Steve Hilton — a move that reshapes the dynamics of the race and undercuts the idea that Bianco’s high-profile investigation translated into political momentum. 

Bianco will now have to reckon, in court and in the political arena, with his decision to seize more than  half a million ballots, breaking the chain of custody. Sensitive voter data — signatures, addresses, voting records — could be put at risk.

How that plays out now could shape the risk of similar interventions by local law enforcement elsewhere — a potential threat to the safe, free, and fair conduct of elections that experts say is worth as much attention as any other.

From Votebeat Texas: Texas counties receive subpoenas for voters’ records from Department of Homeland Security

From Votebeat Wisconsin: Can Madison count some ballots delivered after an 8 p.m. deadline?

From Votebeat Wisconsin: New Wisconsin law seeks to prevent another election certification mess

From Votebeat Pennsylvania: Why Pennsylvania’s secretary of the commonwealth has a unique understanding of noncitizen voting

From Votebeat Michigan: After ‘false elector’ charges cleared, Michigan clerk can once again run his township’s elections

From Votebeat Arizona: Apache County will swap to a new voting model after years of concern over rejected ballots

From Votebeat National: One line in Trump’s order would reshape how long states have to store election records

The DOJ misled a judge about how it’s using voter roll data, Wired

RNC reaches deal with NC election board to remove noncitizens using jury lists, The Charolette Observer

Where mail voting began, worries spread over Trump’s attacks, The New York Times (Paywall)

Colleges are trying to boost student voting. A Trump probe freezes data for that work, NPR

No charges for Wisconsin mayor who removed ballot drop box in 2024, The New York Times (Paywall)

Secretary of state candidate disputes claims she released election results too early, Albuquerque Journal

High schooler’s 3D design saves Seminole County thousands on election equipment, News6

Student IDs no longer permitted for New Hampshire voter identification, NHPR

Fight for county drop boxes trudges on, Latrobe Bulletin

Louisiana GOP races to eliminate an elected office won by an exonerated man, Associated Press

The Constitution could let noncitizens vote, Wall Street Journal (Opinion)

Thumbnail image by Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images