Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco’s seizure of more than 650,000 ballots as part of a criminal investigation into possible election malfeasance was unlawful, according to a California Supreme Court opinion issued Thursday, Sept. 24.
The court also found that California Attorney General Rob Bonta was within his rights under the state constitution to order the sheriff to halt the investigation and order Bianco to comply with Bonta’s directives.
In a unanimous decision in the Cervantes v. Bianco case, the high court’s seven justices said 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.”
“This is not a case involving a few documents,” the opinion written by Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero reads. “It involves the unlawful removal and handling by armed deputies of over 1,000 boxes of documents and not just any documents, but the most precious documents of the citizenry in a democracy: their votes.”
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