California news organizations filed legal motions on Wednesday to unseal secret search warrants that allowed Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco to seize more than 600,000 ballots from the November 2025 special election.
CalMatters, along with The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Riverside Record, and several local television network affiliates submitted a motion in Riverside County court seeking public access to the sealed warrants and supporting documents. The coalition also filed a separate petition with the California Supreme Court requesting the same records.
A Riverside County judge ordered the warrants sealed, along with sworn statements Bianco’s deputies made justifying their request to seize more than 1,400 boxes of Proposition 50 election materials from the Riverside County Registrar of Voters. The warrants authorized Bianco to investigate alleged discrepancies in ballot counting reported by a local activist group.
The news organizations argue the public has a vital interest in viewing these records, which sit at the center of a contentious dispute between Bianco, a Republican candidate for governor, and Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat seeking re-election. “The public should not be forced to navigate these competing allegations without the facts on which the investigation is based,” Jean-Paul Jassy, attorney for the news outlets, wrote in the motion. “Nor does the law require them to.”
Bianco obtained three warrants between February and March from Riverside County Judge Jay Kiel, whom Bianco endorsed during the judge’s 2022 campaign. Kiel sealed the warrants at the sheriff’s office’s request. The sheriff’s office intended to recount the ballots as part of an investigation into what an activist group claimed were discrepancies between ballots cast and tallied.
Art Tinoco, Riverside County’s top elections official, rejected those claims in February, explaining to the county’s Board of Supervisors that the alleged discrepancies resulted from the activist group using flawed and incomplete data.
The investigation and recount are currently on hold after Bonta and the UCLA Voting Rights Project filed legal challenges seeking to halt them. Bonta ordered Bianco to turn over the warrants and supporting statements, arguing in his lawsuits that the sheriff failed to allege a crime or provide sufficient cause to justify seizing the ballots. Bonta accused Bianco of using the investigation as a campaign stunt.
Bonta’s office has refused to release the documents, citing the judge’s sealing order. The sealed records have prevented public scrutiny of both politicians’ statements in the hyper-partisan dispute ahead of a contentious election.
When CalMatters requested copies of the warrants last week, Bianco refused. “No, you’re not going to,” he said. “When (the investigation’s) over, like every other case that’s sealed, when it’s unsealed, you’ll get to see it. Don’t you act like this is something out of the ordinary, because it is not.”
Under California state law, police must execute warrants within 10 days of obtaining them, after which the documents and supporting statements must be made public. However, it is common for law enforcement to request they remain sealed during active criminal investigations.
Attorneys for the media outlets argue that Bianco himself publicized the investigation during a press conference on March 20. They wrote that even if Bianco’s department had confidential information to protect, that does not justify Kiel’s sealing of all records.
“It is hard to imagine a stronger public interest,” Jassy wrote, than “access to a proceeding purporting to resolve allegations relating to election integrity — allegations at the heart of our democracy.”
The case reached the state Supreme Court after Bonta filed an emergency petition seeking to halt Bianco’s ballot-seizure investigation. A lower court previously ruled Bianco’s investigation could proceed.
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