Ballot seizure by Riverside County sheriff was 'unlawful,' California Supreme Court rules
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Set us as preferred The California Supreme Court excoriated Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco over his seizure of hundreds of thousands of Proposition 50 ballots earlier this year, ordering the former gubernatorial candidate to immediately hand over all remaining material in a pair of scathing decisions on Thursday.“We hold that the seizure of the ballots was unlawful,” wrote Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero.
“While allegations of election improprieties are a very serious matter, 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 ruling comes less than two weeks before Californians will start casting ballots in the race for governor and a handful of hotly contested congressional midterms — nationally watched elections that would be vulnerable to similar interference unless the court gave clear orders, advocates warned at oral arguments last month.“It’s bound to be repeated again,” said Chad W.
Dunn of the UCLA Voting Rights Project, which led the first of two election interference suits against Bianco, a popular MAGA personality and former Republican candidate for governor.Bianco has long flirted with President Trump’s election fraud conspiracy movement.
Though the ballot seizures in February were widely seen as a campaign stunt, the legal theory behind them — that local lawmen can commandeer voter materials from elections officials, and that sheriffs are unanswerable to officials who outrank them, including attorneys general — belongs to a larger “constitutional sheriffs” ideology.California‘s seven Supreme Court justices appeared by turns perplexed by and incredulous of those theories during oral arguments last month.“You are walking into a ve...