Sheriff Running for Governor Launches Bogus Voter Fraud Investigation Based on Conservative Activist Claims

The Investigation That Started With Activists, Not Evidence

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco wants to be California's next governor. He also wants voters to believe he's uncovering massive election fraud in his own county. There's just one problem: newly unsealed court documents show his entire investigation is built on claims from conservative activists that election officials say are flat wrong.

Three search warrants released by Riverside County Superior Court reveal that Bianco's investigator, Robert Castellanos, cited allegations from the Riverside Election Integrity Team (REIT)—a conservative activist group—as justification to seize hundreds of thousands of ballots from the 2025 special election. The group claimed there was a 45,000-vote overcount. County election officials reviewed the data and determined the activists simply misunderstood how vote counting works.

That didn't stop Bianco from launching what amounts to a fishing expedition with a badge.

Checking Boxes for Felonies While Admitting No Crime Occurred

Here's where it gets absurd. In all three warrants Bianco filed—one in 2023, another in 2024, and the latest in 2025—investigator Castellanos checked the box indicating "it tends to show that a felony has been committed or that a particular person has committed a felony."

Yet Bianco himself has repeatedly told reporters he's not sure any crime happened at all. He told the San Francisco Chronicle that he believes he's investigating "a mathematical error" and "it appears to us that this is a machine problem."

So which is it? Is the county's elected Registrar of Voters, Art Tinoco, a felon? Or did activists feed the sheriff's office bad data that they ran with anyway because it fit a narrative?

The warrants themselves don't contain any direct evidence of fraud. What they do contain are references to individuals who filed their own records requests and then contacted Castellanos with "additional information related to additional instances of possible voter fraud." Translation: activists did their own amateur analysis, decided they found something suspicious, and the sheriff's office treated their claims as probable cause.

From Machines to Ballots: Mission Creep in Action

The first two warrants focused on vote-counting machines, even though the Registrar of Voters had already stated they did not believe the machines could be tampered with. When that went nowhere, Bianco pivoted.

In February 2025, REIT's Greg Langworthy sent emails to the sheriff's office detailing what he claimed were "alleged inconsistent ballot counting." Based largely on those emails, Bianco moved to seize the actual ballots themselves—hundreds of thousands of them, loaded onto 12 pallets.

Bianco's stated justification? He needed to prevent their destruction. California law requires counties to preserve ballots for six months after an election, and Bianco claimed he was racing the clock. His office said they were planning to do their own hand count, checking only the number of ballots, not how people voted.

Except that's not what happened. Bianco kept seizing ballots even after the California Supreme Court ordered him to stop.

The State Steps In

California Attorney General Rob Bonta, along with the UCLA Voting Rights Project, filed suit to halt Bianco's investigation. The state's argument was straightforward: a sheriff with no election expertise, no evidence of actual fraud, and a clear political agenda had no business commandeering an election and undermining public confidence in the process.

The California Supreme Court agreed, issuing an order directing Bianco to pause his investigation while the court considers the AG's challenge. Bianco, in a move that should concern anyone who cares about the rule of law, continued seizing some ballots even after the court's order.

Why This Matters

This is not a story about a diligent law enforcement officer following evidence where it leads. This is a story about a Republican candidate for governor using his current office to legitimize baseless election fraud claims manufactured by partisan activists.

Bianco filed warrants alleging felonies. He seized ballots by the hundreds of thousands. He defied a state Supreme Court order. And his entire case rests on data that election officials say reflects a misunderstanding of vote-counting procedures, not fraud.

This is the playbook: activists generate claims of fraud, friendly officials treat those claims as credible without independent verification, and the resulting "investigation" becomes evidence that something suspicious happened—even when nothing did.

Riverside County voters cast their ballots in good faith. Their votes were counted by trained election workers using established procedures. And now a sheriff running for higher office is telling them—and the rest of California—that their election can't be trusted.

The only fraud here is the investigation itself.