Editor’s note: 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 Riverside County Superior Court Thursday approved Attorney General Rob Bonta’s request for an expedited filing schedule on the petition to pause Sheriff Chad Bianco’s investigation into alleged election fraud stemming from last November’s special statewide Prop 50 election.
It was the latest action by the court related to a series of lawsuits filed following Bianco’s March 20 press conference about the investigation, first reported by The Riverside Record.
“We’re pleased that the court has granted our request,” the California Department of Justice (DOJ) said in an email to The Riverside Record. “We look forward to continuing to make our case.”
Bianco, who is running for governor, said in an interview with The Record that he was not surprised by Judge Dorothy McLaughlin’s decision.
“The judge has an absolute documented history of political activism,” he said. “When we knew what judge it was we had, we had absolutely every expectation that she was going to do just what she did, which was to defy logic, defy common sense and defy legal precedent based on absolute lies from the Attorney General.”
The decision came days after Bianco, in a court filing opposing the expedited schedule, said the investigation had already been paused pending the resolution of the legal cases, a statement he reiterated to The Record.
“The court has paused it,” he said. “We’re waiting for the courts to decide whether it’s going to resume or not.”
Superior Court Case Filing Reveals New Information
Last week, Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a petition with the Riverside County Superior Court asking the court to order Bianco and his department to comply with Bonta’s supervisory directives to pause the investigation pending review by Bonta’s office, preserve all documents and ballots seized to date and immediately provide the office with all documents previously requested.
Bianco, in an interview with The Record, called Bonta’s petition “an absolute disgusting display of not only political lawfare, but the absolute abuse of our justice system by someone who is supposed to be seeking justice.”
The petition also requested the court to order Bianco comply with all future directives from Bonta’s office and for the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office (RSO) to return all packages containing voted ballots to the custody of the Riverside County Registrar of Voters (ROV).
In a filing opposing Bonta’s request for an expedited schedule, Bianco’s attorney Robert Tyler called the request “not only oppressive and prejudicial, but also completely unnecessary.”
That filing also inadvertently included a link to a public OneDrive folder that Tyler had used to share information about the election investigation with Bonta’s office, as first reported by Inland Empire Law Weekly.
Along with information obtained by the group of residents who call themselves the Riverside Election Integrity Team (REIT) from the ROV were seven incident reports from 2023 filed by RSO Investigator Robert Castellanos and Sgt. James Merrill regarding an investigation into potential election fraud.
In those documents, reviewed by The Record, Castellanos conducted a number of interviews about the security of the systems used by the ROV to conduct elections. Those interviews included questions about whether voting machines could be connected to the internet or could be remotely accessed. County employees interviewed said neither was a possibility.
The sole report by Merrill included a summary of a conversation with then-ROV Rebecca Spencer in which he questioned her about specific people who might have cast more than one ballot. As part of the interview, Spencer walked Merrill through the multiple layers of ballot verification that prevented people from voting more than once, including barcodes on ballots, signature verification and ongoing voter roll maintenance.
The next hearing for this case has been set for April 13 at 8:30 a.m.
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Bianco Supports Motions To Unseal While Criticizing Media
Last Wednesday, a coalition of media outlets including The Record, filed a motion with the Riverside County Superior Court to unseal three warrants associated with Bianco’s current investigation into potential election fraud.
In a Thursday interview with The Record, Bianco said there was “no reason” for the warrants to remain sealed now that they have been served and said he had filed in support of the motion.
He also took aim at media outlets for “trying to paint me as doing something wrong,” stating that it was “common practice” for warrants to be sealed.
“Most warrants should be sealed for the safety of the evidence and sometimes the safety of law enforcement,” he said. “We don’t want people to know what we’re doing and what we’re going to do until we do it afterward.”
However, First Amendment and media law attorney Susan Seager said a court order sealing a warrant was not necessary for that to happen.
“They’re allowed to be secret before they’re served,” she said. “But the law…requires them to be open after they’re served.”
Seager, who heads the Press Freedom Project at the University of California Irvine, also noted that just because it was a “common practice,” did not make the sealing of warrants and related documents legal. In fact, she said, the law provides very specific situations that warrant sealing, including to protect a confidential informant or if a suspect has been named, neither of which appeared to be applicable in these warrants.
“What’s going on in Riverside may be routine, but that doesn’t mean it’s not illegal,” she said. “It is unlawful what the judge did here, and the judges in Riverside, and I’ve seen also in [Los Angeles] County, are thumbing their noses at the law that says after search warrants are executed, they shall be, that means they must be, open to the public.”
On Friday, the media coalition filed a second motion to unseal with the California Supreme Court, a request Seager said the court should grant.
“The California Supreme Court has control over its own court records, its own dockets,” she said. “These records are now part of the California Supreme Court docket, so it has every right and obligation to look at this and see whether they should be sealed, and it should find they should be unsealed immediately.”
Bianco Asks California Supreme Court To Dismiss Cases
In the two cases moving through the California Supreme Court, one filed by Bonta and the other filed by the UCLA Voting Rights Project (VRP), Bianco’s attorney has argued the court should decline to review both. Gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra serves as a voting rights advisor for the VRP.
In the case filed by the VRP on behalf of four Riverside County voters, Tyler argued in a filing that the voters lacked Constitutional standing because they had suffered no “concrete, particularized injury,” failed to demonstrate why the case was filed with the state’s highest court instead of at the county level, could not show a ministerial duty owed to them by the sheriff’s office and had no beneficial interest in proscribing the sheriff’s ability to investigate alleged election fraud.
“Their petition is very interesting,” said Sonni Waknin, senior voting rights attorney at the VPR. “They’re arguing about these jurisdictional issues, why the court doesn’t have original jurisdiction and why a mandate is not necessary in this case.”
But at the core of VRP’s argument, Waknin said, was that while Bianco clearly has the authority to investigate alleged crimes in the county, he did not have the authority to remove ballots from the ROV’s office.
“We argue in our petition that the taking of these ballots jeopardizes voters’ privacy of their ballot,” Waknin said. “The California Constitution protects the right to a secret vote, and it was amended after the 2000 election with what happened with Bush v. Gore, to ensure that recount processes are done in a way that is not just transparent, but that also protects the secrecy of the ballot.”
Waknin also said that because Tyler filed his initial opposition without direction by the court, and VRP filed its response, the case had been accelerated and was now at a point where it’s up to the court what happens next.
“Right now, we’re actually just waiting on the California Supreme Court to let the parties know if they’re going to exercise original jurisdiction or if they’re going to tell us, as the petitioners, to file in a lower court,” Waknin said.
The other California Supreme Court case, filed by Bonta, is also awaiting court action after Tyler filed his initial opposition, asking the court to deny review while the petition filed with the Riverside County Superior Court works its way through the judicial system or appoint a special master who could oversee the recounting of ballots.
The Attorney General’s Office, in its response, argued that relief from the California Supreme Court was warranted due to the “extraordinary circumstances,” of the case.
Bianco said in an interview with The Record that all of the lawsuits filed in response to his investigation were “not legitimate,” and were trying to cover up a legal investigation of an alleged crime.
“I investigated a crime. I went to a judge to get a warrant. The judge believed we were doing the right thing,” he said. “The judge is the one that determined it, not me; I didn’t just go randomly do it.”
Bianco, in responding to questions about the lawsuits, called out both Bonta and Becerra for what he said were politically-motivated actions.
“The truth is obvious, if you just employ common sense, but you’re trying to look into something much bigger, much more sinister, and the sinister part is coming from the Attorney General,” Bianco said. “Why is the Attorney General covering up a case? That’s the initial number one
“And why did an absolute failed politician, who’s failing in his own campaign for governor, jump on the bandwagon to try and get media coverage,” he continued. “It’s bullshit politics. That’s what we’re seeing.”
None of the lawsuits argue against Bianco’s authority to investigate alleged crimes in the county, but rather question whether he has the authority to ignore directives from the Attorney General’s Office and the process by which this particular investigation has been conducted.
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