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 Board of Supervisors Tuesday voted 4-1 to not authorize the hiring of outside counsel or pay outside counsel to defend the lawsuits stemming from Sheriff Chad Bianco’s investigation into alleged election fraud. Supervisor Karen Spiegel was the lone dissenter.
“The criteria that all government agencies use is pretty clear about whether someone should or should not be paid for their legal defense, and that criteria is whether they are acting within or outside of the scope of their position,” Supervisor Jose Medina said in an interview with The Riverside Record. “So from that action, I think it can be inferred that most of the board didn’t feel like he was acting within the scope of his job.”
Spiegel, in an emailed statement to The Record, said the county regularly hired outside law firms when there was need for specialized expertise, additional manpower or due to a conflict.
“Recent events provide an opportunity to review, and if necessary, clarify the county’s process for hiring lawyers outside of the county counsel’s office,” she said. “I will take an item to our next board meeting for my colleagues’ consideration.”
Spiegel’s statement was in response to questions about the process by which a county department could obtain outside counsel and whether Bianco had followed that process when selecting attorney Robert Tyler to represent him and the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office (RSO).
Bianco did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Record, which first reported on the investigation in February, but previously said he and his department were unable to obtain legal representation from county counsel.
A county official told The Record county counsel was representing both the county and the Riverside County Registrar of Voters in the cases.
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The vote was announced following the board’s April 14 closed session where supervisors discussed the four petitions filed against the sheriff — Attorney General Rob Bonta’s and the UCLA Voting Rights Project’s (VRP) California Supreme Court filings as well as Bonta’s petitions filed with the Court of Appeal and the Riverside County Superior Court.
Ahead of the closed session, a number of speakers urged the supervisors to vote against approving and covering the cost of Bianco’s legal defense in the cases.
“This mess is of his own making,” said Chani Beeman, a local activist and member of the Riverside Sheriff Accountability Coalition (RSAC). “It’s beyond time to tell him that the gravy train has left the station.”
Prior to the meeting, a group held a brief press conference outside of the county building calling on the supervisors to vote against funding Bianco’s legal counsel.
“The public will remember whether this board shows accountability or accommodation. Reject this request fully, decisively and without agitation,” said Anthony Noriega, district director for the League of United Latin American Citizens of the Inland Empire. “I say, ‘Pay your own bills, Bianco.’”
Other speakers included Riverside Councilmember Clarissa Cervantes, who is running for Assembly District 58, and Nathan Kempe, operations director of the nonprofit Starting Over Strong.
Cervantes and Kempe are two of the four Riverside County voters being represented by the VRP. The California Supreme Court has not yet said whether it would review the petition.
On Monday, the organization sent a letter to County Counsel Minh Tran alleging the agenda items were insufficiently descriptive and further urging the board to vote against hiring outside counsel and covering already incurred expenses, if that was something they were set to discuss.
“The sheriff acted without the consent of county government, in a manner the state’s attorney general and private parties challenged in court,” the letter said. “The actions the sheriff took have now been stayed by the California Supreme Court. The county and corresponding taxpayers are not on the hook for this course of conduct.”
Also on Monday, Riverside County Superior Court Judge O.G. Magno indicated that he was open to accepting a jointly filed request that the court temporarily pause legal proceedings until the conclusion of the California Supreme Court case. However, that filing has not yet been signed by the court.
Last week, the California Supreme Court said it would review the merits of Bonta’s petition and further ordered Bianco halt his investigation pending that review.
The court also ordered all of the unredacted filings to be made public as a result of the Riverside County Superior Court’s order to unseal. As part of those filings was the unredacted declaration filed by Sgt. James Merrill, which shed light on the process that led to the March 19 warrant signed by Judge Jay Kiel.
“On March 18, 2026, we sought direction from Judge Kiel, the judge who issued the warrants because the attorney general sought to stop the counting of the ballots,” the filing said. “I also understood that the intent and purpose of obtaining the warrant was to count the ballots, although that was not expressly ordered previously.”
According to the filing, Kiel said he would not give a direct order for RSO to count the ballots, but suggested the department submit an order for a special master, which he later signed.
The filing also laid out the department’s plan for seizing and counting, which included storing the boxes at a facility under 24-hour surveillance by internal and external security cameras.
When it came to counting the ballots, RSO said it would use a double-blind verification method in which two deputies would count batches of ballots, switch and recount before seeing if their numbers matched. If the numbers matched, the count for those boxes would be verified. If they didn’t match, two additional deputies would come in to do the count again.
Once that count was completed, the deputies would select 10-15 boxes randomly for a final manual audit. If any batch failed the quality assurance testing, the entire pallet would be recounted.
At his March 20 press conference, Bianco said it was his belief that the deputies could accomplish the recount of more than 600,000 ballots in roughly five days.
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The reason the ballots need to be counted is to check the Registrar Tinoco’s theory that there actually were 657,322 ballots counted in the Prop 50 Election, not 611,426 as reported on the ROV election workers’ ballot collection logs. His theory is that his workers wrote inaccurate numbers on their paperwork. No one will no if his theory is correct until the physical ballots are counted. Last Tuesday in my public comment to the supervisors I suggested that our Auditor/Controller count the ballots: auditors are professional counters, and our Registrar needs to know the actual count so he will know the cause of the current discrepancy. Art cannot fix the problem, whether it is his election workers, the Liberty Vote machines, or some other cause, if he does not know the cause.
This count must take place. There is enough evidence to call into question this discrepancy. To challenge the organization who discovered it by claiming the workers “miscounted” is as silly and unprofessional a response as could be given.
I cannot understand the storm of protest against counting the paper ballots unless those protesting the counting have concerns the ballots count will in fact reveal that the discrepancy is real. Shame on the Board of Supervisors for failing to provide legal protection for the Sheriff’s office. What do they mean this is not the Sheriff’s area of concern or that Bianco is out of bounds? It is a criminal investigation.