California Supreme Court Sets Date For Oral Arguments in Bianco Cases

All legal documents pertaining to this case obtained by The Riverside Record can be accessed here. All of The Riverside Record’s reporting about Sheriff Chad Bianco’s election investigation can be found here.

The California Supreme Court has set the date for oral arguments in two cases filed in response to Sheriff Chad Bianco’s investigation into alleged election irregularities. Both cases will be heard in a special session set for 10 a.m. on August 24 in San Francisco.

“You don’t have to be a lawyer to know that the attorney general can not stop a legal investigation into a potential crime. This is basic common sense,” Bianco said in an emailed statement to The Riverside Record. “It will be very interesting to see if the highest court in the state is going to decide the case by facts or by politics.”

Earlier this year, Bianco, who at the time was running for governor as a Republican, launched an investigation into alleged election irregularities stemming from the November 2025 special statewide election for Prop 50. The investigation, first reported by The Record, was launched following a report from a group of Riverside County residents calling themselves the Riverside Election Integrity Team (REIT) that said there were 45,896 fewer ballots cast than counted.

Riverside County Registrar of Voters (ROV) Art Tinoco has vehemently denied the allegation, stating that the group conducted its audit using a non-standard method that included raw data that was both prone to human error and collected before ballots were processed. Additionally, Tinoco said the group might not have all the information regarding ballots from confidential voters, conditional voter registration voters and provisional voters. REIT has pushed back on those assertions.

As part of the investigation, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office seized more than 600,000 voted ballots and other materials related to the election, prompting not only a flurry of lawsuits at various levels of the state’s judicial system, but also a new state law that makes it a felony to take ballots from a county registrar and restricts law enforcement from interfering with the administration of elections.

“We saw a real need to strengthen and enforce protections to ensure ballots remain secure and that voters have the confidence that their voices will be heard through the ballot box,” Sen. Sabrina Cervantes (D-Riverside) said at the time. “We felt that this was an urgent matter ahead of the midterms, and we wanted to get this done before the primary election to make sure that we stood up for election integrity in the state of California, and hope that other states would follow suit.”

Cervantes, who authored the bill, said her legislative efforts were completely separate from her sister’s legal case.

That case was filed by the UCLA Voting Rights Project (VRP) on behalf of four Riverside County voters: Riverside Councilmember Clarissa Cervantes who is running for Assembly District 58, Indio Councilmember Oscar Ortiz who unsuccessfully ran for Assembly District 36 this year, Rebecca Robinson and Nathan Kempe, who is the operations director of the nonprofit Starting Over Strong, which has been pushing for increased sheriff oversight in the county. Xavier Becerra, who is running for governor as a Democrat, serves as a voting rights advisor for VRP.

Initially, the court said the core issue of the case was whether the petitioners were legally able to request that the court direct the sheriff’s department to return the ballots to the ROV on the grounds that the seizure violated Elections Code. The court will also be considering whether the new state law has any impact on the case.

“It is critically important that the integrity of ballot materials is never compromised as they were with Sheriff Bianco’s unorthodox and ill-supported investigation,” UCLA VRP Legal Director Chad Dunn said in a statement to The Record. “Every California voter benefits from trained, sworn and experienced elections staff handling their ballots according to written and standardized election laws and procedures and not by the unsupervised processes of an elected law enforcement officer.”

As part of setting the date for this case, the Supreme Court also invited Attorney General (AG) Rob Bonta to participate in oral argument in support of the petitioners and also requested confirmation from Secretary of State (SOS) Shirley Weber whether she intended to appear. Bonta and Weber, who are both running for reelection this November, have until August 7 to inform the court whether they would appear. The Record reached out to both the AG and the SOS, but did not hear back prior to publication.

The court said a subsequent order regarding the sequence in which arguments would be presented would be issued at a later date. 

The court will also hear the case filed by Bonta. The issues of this case hinge on the questions of the scope of the AG’s constitutional and statutory authority to supervise and direct the activities of a county sheriff, whether the AG is legally able to request that a court direct Bianco to cease his investigation into last November’s election and whether the AG is legally able to request that a court cancel or stop the execution of a search warrant if it was issued in violation of the AG’s directive or obviously flawed.

Additionally, the court will consider whether the new state law has any impact on the case.

Members of the public can attend oral argument in person at the courtroom in the Ronald M. George State Office Complex in the Earl Warren Building at 350 McAllister St. in San Francisco or via livestream on the court’s website.