California media groups are demanding that the Riverside voting orders be printed

from Ryan Sabalow and Jeanne KuangCalMatters

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Several media organizations, including CalMatters, on Wednesday submitted an application in Riverside County Court seeking public access to the warrants, a judge approved, allowing Sheriff Chad Bianco to seize hundreds of thousands of ballots for an unprecedented investigation into the outcome of the November 2025 special election.

The groups also filed a separate petition with the California Supreme Court that also wants the records unsealed.

A Riverside County judge has ordered the warrants sealed, along with affidavits Bianco’s deputies filed in front of a judge in support of their request to seize more than 1,400 boxes of Proposition 50 election materials from Riverside County’s voter registry.

Attorneys representing CalMatters along with The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Riverside Record, other newspapers and local television network affiliates filed a motion to unseal the warrants and affidavits.

The coalition says it’s vital that the records be made public because they are at the heart of a bitter dispute over election integrity between two powerful state officials: Bianco, who is running for governor as a Republican, and Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat who is running for re-election.

“The public should not be forced to navigate these competing allegations without the facts on which the investigation is based,” Jean-Paul Jassi, a lawyer for the news outlets, wrote in the motion. “Nor does the law require them.”

Bianco obtained three warrants in February and March from Riverside County Judge Jay Keel authorizing the sheriff’s office to begin seizing ballots and other election materials from Riverside County election officials. Kiel, whom Bianco approved when he ran for the bench in 2022, sealed the warrants at the request of the sheriff’s office.

Bianco intended his deputies to count more than 600,000 ballots cast in the county last year as part of an investigation into what a local activist group called discrepancies between the number of ballots cast and the number of ballots counted. The county’s top elections official, Art Tinoco, denied those claims and explained to the county Board of Supervisors in February that they were the result of the activist group’s use of erroneous and incomplete data.

The investigation and recount have been halted, Bianco said earlier this week, after Bonta and the UCLA Voting Rights Project filed several legal challenges trying to stop them. Bonta had ordered Bianco to turn over the warrants and supporting statements. He said in his lawsuits that the sheriff did not allege a crime or provide sufficient reason to justify the warrants being seized, and accused Bianco of using the investigation as a campaign stunt.

Bonta’s office refused to release those documents, citing a judge’s order to seal them.

Keeping them under seal has prevented the public from being able to scrutinize the statements of the two politicians in a hyper-partisan row ahead of a contentious election.

Bianco, in an interview last week, also denied CalMatters’ request for copies of the orders.
“No, you won’t,” he said. “When (the investigation) is over, like any other case that’s sealed, when it’s unsealed, you’ll be able to see it. … Don’t act like it’s unusual, because it’s not.”

Under state law, police must execute warrants within 10 days of receiving them, after which documents and supporting police statements must be released. But it’s common for law enforcement to want them sealed during active criminal investigations.

In the case of the ballots, lawyers for the media say Bianco himself disclosed the investigation during a press conference on March 20. They wrote that even if Bianco’s department had confidential information to protect, that did not justify sealing all of Kiel’s records.

“It is hard to imagine a stronger public interest,” Jassi wrote, than “access to proceedings aimed at resolving claims related to the integrity of elections — claims at the heart of our democracy.”

The case went to the state Supreme Court after Bonta filed an emergency petition seeking to halt Bianco’s ballot-tapping investigation. A lower court ruled that the Bianco investigation could continue.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.