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Facts Matter
California Sheriff Seized 650,000 Ballots for Hand-Recount, but Forced to Pause After AG Legal Challenges
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Moving along now to the topic of election integrity, there is a sheriff over in California who's in a bit of a Mexican standoff with the state government right now. His name is Chad Bianco and he's the sheriff of Riverside county, which is directly east of la. And in February of this year, Sheriff bianco seized over 600,000 ballots that were cast in a 2025 special election. Quote, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, who is running to be the next California governor, has, has seized more than half a million ballots from a November 2025 special election on redistricting, triggering a political and legal confrontation with state officials. Now, the backstory here was fascinating, and so please do smash those like and subscribe buttons, strap in and let's get right into it. In November of 2025, California statewide held a special election. It was a ballot measure called California Proposition 50, and it asked the voters a simple yes or no question whether or not the state should redraw its congressional map. You see, at the time, Texas had recently redrawn their map, giving them an additional five Republican districts. And so Californians were asked if they should do the same for Democrats. And they did. Proposition 50. It ultimately passed with 64% of Californians voting in favor of it. Quote, the new map was designed to boost the number of seats for Democrats in the 2026 midterm elections. Proposition 50 passed with nearly 64% of the vote and, and could send up to five additional Democratic representatives to Congress. And so very good. Getting 64% of the vote meant that this was a very popular issue. Even in Riverside county, which is more conservative leaning compared to the rest of California, Proposition 50 got 56% of the vote. However, over in Riverside County, a local watchdog group found something to be amiss. A group of volunteers called the Riverside Election Integrity Team, they looked at the public records at the local registrar's office, and they claimed to have found handwritten intake logs for only 611,428 ballots being received. However, the county they reported 657,322 votes to the state. That was a gap of nearly 46,000 more votes reported to the state than ballots allegedly being received. And so this watchdog group reported their findings to the local sheriff's office, led by Sheriff Chad Bianco, who in turn took these allegations seriously and opened up an official local investigation. Quote, Bianco announced the investigation at a press conference on March 20, saying it stemmed from a complaint by a local citizens group that reviewed public Records from the county Registrar of Voters. Sheriff Bianco rejected the Registrar's explanation that official machine counts showed only a minor deviation attributable to human error, calling the probe a fact finding mission. But Bianco said investigators plan to physically count ballots and compare the total with certified results. And the whole thing was actually on the up and up because as a part of this probe, Sheriff Bianco obtained a legal warrant from a local judge to seize all the local ballots, over half a million of them. He then began a process of doing a hand recount to see what the true vote tally should be. He then also obtained another search warrant and he was able to seize an additional 426 boxes of ballot related materials from the November 2025 election. So far, so good. However, when this probe was made public, the local election officials, they came out in opposition and they said that the watchdog group who initially reported the anomaly simply misunderstood how to interpret the raw data. Quote, Local electoral officials have dismissed those concerns, saying the citizens group misunderstood how to interpret the raw data, including the lack of precision of hand counted tallies. According to state officials, the actual difference was only 103 votes. Now, Sheriff Bianco did not accept that explanation for such a large disparity of 46,000 votes that were reported to him. However, the California Attorney General did. He took the side of the local election officials and the Attorney General basically began to work to shut down the investigation asap. Quote, county election officials and California Attorney General Rob Bunta, a Democrat, dispute Sheriff Bianco's claims and authority to conduct the probe. Sheriff Bianco said the Attorney General sought to halt the probe, arguing that law enforcement officers are not authorized or trained to conduct election recounts. The sheriff noted that representatives of the Attorney General had asked them to pause the investigation until after March 6 without providing a valid reason. A judge later ordered that counting resume under the supervision of a special master appointed by the court. Also, and this next part was a bit ironic because the Attorney General said that this type of a probe might jeopardize public confidence in future elections, to which the sheriff responded by saying that not conducting this probe, at least at this point, would actually be what jeopardizes public confidence in future elections. Quote, Attorney General Bunta has characterized the seizure as unprecedented. In letters sent to the Sheriff's office over the past two months, he wrote that the action was unacceptable and that it sets a dangerous precedent and will only sow distrust in our elections, to which Sheriff Bianco responded by citing a University of California San Diego study that found that about 40% of Californians distrust election systems and added that what does so mistrust in our system is failing to conduct an investigation, or worse, attempting to stop or interfere with a lawful investigation to sweep it under the rug so evidence can possibly be destroyed. Now, regardless of the back and forth rationale battle, the Attorney General wound up filing motions with the state Supreme Court to stop the investigation immediately, saying that the sheriff lacked legal authority to conduct this type of a probe. UCLA's Voting Rights Project, they filed a lawsuit as well against the sheriff and the cavalcade worked, at least for now. Just a few days ago, Sheriff Bianco came out and he said that he is voluntarily putting a pause on his investigation while he deals with this onslaught of legal challenges that have been filed against both him as well as his office. Quote, we are on hold because of the politically motivated lawsuits and court filings. And so there you have it. As of right now, the investigation is on hold while the legal challenges play themselves out in court. Also, it's worth mentioning that the clock is ticking here, given the fact that under California state law, the ballots from the November 2025 special election, they only need to be preserved and retained until May of this year, after which they can legally be destroyed. And so we'll just have to wait and see what comes of this case or if the clock just runs out before the legal challenges can be settled. If you want to dig deeper into the specifics of this case, I will throw my research notes down into the description box below, which is of course that description box right below those like and subscribe buttons, both of which I hope you've already smashed. But if not, here's another opportunity. And also I'd love to know your thoughts regarding this case. Do you think an investigation like this causes mistrust in the system? Or does not doing the investigation cause mistrust in the system? Or maybe if both of those are true, if both cause mistrust at this point, where we are now in the story, what is the better path to take to minimize the amount of mistrust in the system? Leave your thoughts in the comments. I'd love to know, and I will be reading them tonight as well as into the week. And then lastly lastly, I'll mention that over on EpicTV we just published a phenomenal documentary called Healthcare Decoded. Basically, it's a series of great interviews with doctors, and in the film it exposes some of the actual problems with America's healthcare system because we all kind of like Feel it intuitively that the US Is pretty much the best, most advanced healthcare system in the world. But at the same time, the system is complicated, it's convoluted, and because of years of government patchwork solutions, the whole thing is just a maze to navigate. I know a story of a guy, he went to the hospital because he needed some emergency work done. And when he came out, he was billed something like $4,000 because they assumed that he didn't have insurance. And so, but he did have insurance. So he called up the hospital and he said, oh, hey, you billed me $4,000, but I have this insurance plan. And so they said, okay, no problem. What's your insurance? They took down his information, got his account number, and afterwards they said, okay, no problem, you owe us $5,000 out of pocket. And he said, how could that be? When you thought I didn't have insurance, you said, I owe 5,000, 4,000. But now that you know I have insurance, you're saying I owe 5,000. And they said, yes, because 4,000 was the price that you have to pay when you don't have insurance. When you do have insurance, the actual price is something like 18,000, but your insurance company has negotiated it only down to 5,000 that you would pay. And so the guy was on the phone, flabbergasted, and he said, okay, well, can you just forget that I have insurance? I'd rather just pay the 4,000 as if I didn't have insurance. But he said, no, we can't do that because legally you did have an insurance policy in, in place during that period of time when you got the services. So now you have to pay 5,000 rather than 4,000. And so it's a story like that that just elucidates how broken the system actually is that such a thing could even take place. And so anyway, the documentary, it lives the veil about how the system actually operates behind the scenes, why this actual system is in place, and perhaps more importantly, it actually provides practical, real world tips on how you can navigate the complexities of the system in a smart way. And so, yeah, it's a great documentary and you can find a link to it. It'll be right there at the top of the description box below. Just click on that link, check out EpicTV, and you can watch the documentary right away. And then, until next time, I'm your host, Roman from the Epic times. Stay informed. Most importantly, stay free.