Riverside County Sheriff — and former gubernatorial candidate — Chad Bianco broke the law when he seized over 600,000 ballots that had been cast in the county at the November 2025 election, and again when he then disregarded California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s direction to preserve the ballots and pause his investigation. Those are the rulings of a unanimous Supreme Court today in Cervantes v. Bianco and Bonta v. Bianco. Current gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra is co-counsel for the Cervantes petitioners.
The court’s opinions (Cervantes; Bonta) are both authored by Chief Justice Guerrero. Justice Liu filed a separate concurrence in Cervantes in addition to signing the court’s opinion.
In Cervantes, the court holds that “Bianco’s seizure of the ballots violated the plain language of [former Elections Code] section 15551, subdivision (d), commanding that ‘[i]n no event’ shall voted ballots ‘be taken from the custody of the elections official.’ ” (Section 15551(d) was amended, effective five days ago, by SB 1418, but the court relies on the earlier version and notes that the new version “is at least as protective of ballots as preexisting law was.”) The court thus orders the Sheriff “to return the seized ballots to the registrar’s custody.”
“[A]llegations of election improprieties are a very serious matter,” the court states, but “our Elections Code contains numerous established mechanisms for investigating and proving misconduct that do not compromise the integrity of voted ballots — contrary to the means employed here.” The opinion notes “a legislative intent to ensure the integrity of the ballots through strict chain-of-custody protocols, robust oversight, and public transparency.” There is to be “continuous custody by election professionals,” the court finds.
By contrast, the court concludes that “allowing law enforcement unfettered access to ballots, or the ability to handle and count them in secret based on unregulated protocols, itself creates a substantial risk to election integrity.”
In his concurrence, Justice Liu amplifies the integrity-of-elections theme, highlights the difficult job of election officials, and absolves the county registrar of voters from blame for complying with the sheriff’s ballot seizure by search warrants. “Free and fair elections are the lifeblood of democracy,” he writes, and continues by stating that election officials, who he calls “the backbone of our electoral system,” have, “[i]n recent years, . . . faced increased harassment, threats, and political pressure.”
For his part, the registrar was “was caught between a rock and a hard place,” Liu says, citing the search warrants on one hand and the section 15551 prohibition on the other. But Liu suggests the registrar could have moved in superior court to quash the warrants, a route that could be taken in the future by “election officials who face similar dilemmas.” He nonetheless concedes, “It is a lot to ask of our election officials that they not only do their jobs competently but also stand ready to sue anyone who unlawfully interferes with their duties. Yet here we are.”
In the Bonta case, the court says it is for the first time “address[ing] a dispute between the Attorney General and a sheriff” concerning long-established constitutional and statutory provisions giving the Attorney General broad supervisory authority over sheriffs. The court concludes that, under the provisions, the Attorney General has “the power to give binding directions to sheriffs regarding a particular investigation.” In doing so, it disapproves what it says is dicta in its People v. Brophy (1942) 49 Cal.App.2d 15 decision, “to the extent its analysis is inconsistent with our conclusion that the Attorney General may issue binding directions regarding a criminal investigation that comport with the Attorney General’s responsibility ‘to see that the laws of the State are uniformly and adequately enforced.’ (Cal. Const., art. V, § 13.)” And it holds that Bonta’s orders to Bianco fell within that broad authority.
Liu concludes his Cervantes concurrence by noting the relative speed with which the court acted on the two cases and warns that the court in the future “is prepared to act with dispatch and clarity to ensure that our elections are conducted in accordance with the law.”
Election law expert, UCLA law professor, and Horvitz & Levy alum Rick Hasen writes on his authoritative Election Law Blog, “These are important decisions, not only to reaffirm what I thought was clear California law against ballot seizures, but to raise the prominence of the issue as we worry about potential seizures of ballots or voting machines or materials after November.”
