# Chad Bianco **Chad Bianco** is the sheriff of Riverside County, California, and a Republican candidate for governor of California, a run he announced in **February 2025** — the first major Republican to enter the 2026 race. His status in the November 2026 general election is **[unconfirmed]** in this vault and should be verified before citing. Bianco is in the vault for one reason: in **March 2026** his department seized more than **650,000 voted ballots** from the Riverside County Registrar of Voters under a search warrant, in a claimed fraud investigation into the November 2025 California special election on [[Proposition 50 (California)]]. The county registrar said the claims rested on "a misinterpretation of preliminary vote count data." On **24 September 2026** the California Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the seizure was unlawful and ordered the ballots returned, Chief Justice [[Patricia Guerrero]] writing that his arguments failed to persuade the court to read California election law "in a manner inconsistent with its plain text, which mandates that voted ballots remain in the custody of elections officials." Attorney General [[Rob Bonta]] had called the standoff an "unprecedented constitutional emergency," and the ruling also established that California's Attorney General holds direct supervisory authority over sheriffs. The case matters structurally, not just locally: it is the first instance in the vault of a **break in an election chain of custody arriving through a valid warrant** rather than through an unauthorized hand. See [[Election Ballot Chain of Custody Flow]], stage 11. Expand with: his earlier record as sheriff, his Constitutional Sheriffs affiliations if any, the gubernatorial campaign, the procedural history of the ballot case, and whether any state or federal charge followed. This is a stub — created in the 2026-10-03 ASCII map build. Expand as noted above. ## See Also - [[Election Ballot Chain of Custody Flow]] · [[Patricia Guerrero]] · [[Rob Bonta]] - [[Proposition 50 (California)]] · [[Gavin Newsom]] - [[Election Denialism]] · [[Voter Suppression]]