Conservative election group drove Republican sheriff’s ballot seizure, documents show

By Raheem Hosseini, Bob Egelko,Staff WritersUpdated April 8, 2026 6:30 p.m.

Documents unsealed by the Riverside County Superior Court show that Sheriff Chad Bianco’s office credited a conservative election denial group’s disputed claims about the November 2025 statewide election as its justification for seizing 650,000 ballots, injecting the Republican gubernatorial candidate into the middle of California’s fight with the Trump administration over free and fair elections.

The warrants had previously been sealed from public view, but were ordered unsealed Wednesday by a Riverside Superior Court judge following a motion to make the documents public filed by a coalition of media outlets that included the San Francisco Chronicle.

• Related: California Supreme Court halts Republican sheriff’s ballot investigation

The documents provide some additional details about Bianco’s motivations for conducting the highly unusual probe and Attorney General Rob Bonta’s assertion that it is baseless, though they do not change the shape of the ongoing dispute.

Bonta, who sued to halt Bianco’s investigation, had previously said that the sheriff lacked probable cause to conduct a criminal investigation into November’s election and argued in subsequent court documents that none of the material the sheriff obtained with judicial search warrants contained evidence of crimes by election officials that could be the legal basis of an investigation.

The threshold for conducting a criminal investigation is probable cause, which means there’s good reason to believe that a crime occurred and that a person or persons were responsible for it.

In the three warrants he submitted from Feb. 9 to March 19, sheriff’s investigator Robert Castellanos checks the box indicating there is probable cause that “tends to show that a felony has been committed or that a particular person has committed a felony” — but he does not articulate the crime or describe a potential perpetrator, other than a general reference to “possible election fraud.”

The specific reason Castellanos does give for seizing ballots are the claims made by the private group Riverside County Election Integrity Team, or REIT, of a 45,000-vote overcount, which local and state election officials forcefully rejected as a provably incorrect interpretation of raw voting data.

He said in a sworn affidavit that an REIT member, Greg Langworthy, emailed him in February about “alleged inconsistent ballot counting” by the county registrar, Art Tinoco. Castellanos said he was told that REIT’s review of the ballots found an inflated total that included 16,000 ballots Tinoco’s office had rejected.

“I reviewed (REIT’s) handwritten logs that supported Mr. Langworthy’s representations,” Castellanos said — apparently the basis of Bianco’s claim that he had adequately alleged criminal conduct. He did not offer any allegations of intentional falsification of voting records. 

Writing that the state’s six-month timeline for keeping ballots in statewide elections created a sense of urgency, Castellanos wrote on Feb. 9, “In order to prove or disprove any criminal conduct, I am requesting to seize and conduct a review/audit the ballots from the 2025 special election.”

But veteran legal observers who reviewed the documents expressed doubts that they justified a criminal search warrant.

“I see a lot of speculation and accusations by Bianco but not the evidence that supports probable cause,” Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor who teaches at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, told the Chronicle.

Robert Weisberg, a Stanford law professor and co-director of his school’s Criminal Justice Center, said that “even if we can believe the lower estimate of ballots” that REIT provided to Castellanos, “I don’t see any evidence that the registrar’s higher number reflects fraud.”

Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt, an election law expert who previously said Bianco might have had reason for his investigation, said the affidavits sharply disabused him of that notion.

Levitt said he found “dangerous” and “glaring” issues with the warrants, all adding up to a failure to establish probable cause or even articulate what felony the sheriff’s office was ostensibly seeking to investigate.

From Levitt’s perspective, the first warrant doesn’t say why voters’ ballots need to be seized a day before county officials were to hold a public meeting explaining the alleged discrepancy and two months before the ballots were to be destroyed. The second ballot affidavit blames the registrar’s office for not providing election materials the sheriff’s office didn’t request or provide a reason for wanting. And the third affidavit’s request for a hand-counting process asks for something that is beyond the scope or a search warrant.

“Boy oh boy,” groaned Levitt, who formerly worked on elections matters in the U.S. Department of Justice during the Obama administration. “The more information that comes to light about this, the more Sheriff Bianco has proven himself to not just be out of line, but way out of line.”

A Republican candidate for California governor who shares President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated views about widescale voting fraud and supports his calls to clear the voter rolls with new documentation requirements, Bianco has caused national ripples with his investigation into November’s Proposition 50 election results.

In February, Bianco’s office seized 12 pallets containing 1,086 ballot boxes from the Riverside County elections office. 

The discrepancy wouldn’t have affected the outcome of the election in California or Riverside County. Tinoco told elected supervisors on Feb. 10 that a purported “audit” of the Prop 50 election by REIT was actually a misguided comparison of preliminary hand-counted estimates to precise machine counts that determine official totals.

In a previous interview with the Chronicle, Bianco denounced Tinoco, Bonta and Secretary of State Shirley N. Weber.

“I don’t give a crap what the attorney general and the secretary of state and the ROV tell you,” he said last month. Referring to Tinoco specifically, he went on, “I’m sick of him. I don’t even care what he says. And I don’t care what Bonta says because he is corrupt.”

Along with Bonta’s lawsuit, the UCLA Voting Rights Project, joined by former state Attorney General Xavier Becerra, a Democratic candidate for governor, asked the California Supreme Court to protect Riverside County voters’ ballots from the sheriff’s office.

On Wednesday, the state Supreme Court ordered Bianco to pause his investigation as it considers Bonta’s challenge.

Bianco’s two previous elections investigations have not proven any wrongdoing.

California’s next governor will have the opportunity to decide whether the state remains among the Trump administration’s biggest opponents or pivots to become one of its most powerful allies.

The investigation by Bianco, polling third behind Trump-endorsed conservative commentator Steven Hilton, sharpens the fork in the road for California’s voters. The sheriff has said he agrees with Trump’s desire to do away with mail voting and force every American voter to re-register with proof-of-citizenship documents that could disenfranchise millions.

Bianco also said California should turn over its voter rolls to the Trump administration, which unsuccessfully sued for them, and expressed support for ICE patrols at polling places — which would be illegal.

Levitt said the only indication of a possible crime the affidavits gave him are ones potentially committed by Bianco’s office.

“I wonder if his seizure of ballots actually broke the chain of custody in a way … that breaks California law,” he said.