The Supreme Court late yesterday announced it would soon hold a rare special oral argument session to hear two matters concerning the Riverside County Sheriff’s seizure of over 600,000 ballots that had been cast in the county at the November 2025 election. On August 24, just two weeks before its regularly scheduled September calendar, the court will conduct oral arguments in Attorney General v. Bianco and Cervantes v. Bianco.
More about the cases here, here, and here.
Also yesterday, the Chief Justice assigned First District, Division Five, Court of Appeal Justice Gordon B. Burns as the pro tem justice for both cases. A pro tem is needed because Governor Newsom has yet to fill the nine-month-old vacancy created by Justice Jenkins’s October 2025 retirement.
In the Cervantes case, the court invited the Attorney General “to participate in oral argument as amicus curiae in support of petitioners, for which additional time would be allotted,” and it asked the real party in interest Secretary of State to “confirm [ ] . . . whether she intends to appear at oral argument.” (Both have filed briefs in the matter.) After the court hears — by Friday — the Attorney General’s and Secretary of State’s intentions, it will “issue a further order specifying the sequence in which arguments will be presented.”
Holding oral arguments other than at regularly scheduled times is unusual. We can think of two other times in the last 15 years that the court did so. Both were to hear election law cases. (See here and here.)
We assume that briefs for the cases will soon be posted here and that the arguments will be live streamed.
Under the 90-day rule, opinions in the two ballot-seizure cases should file by November 19. But, if the court decides the cases within a week of the arguments, that would make 16 August opinions.
