Behind a sheriff’s seizure of over half a million ballots: ‘Research’ from election conspiracy theorists

The California sheriff who seized nearly 650,000 ballots from November’s special redistricting election was working off a tip from a citizen-led “election integrity” group with a history of questioning vote totals.

The Riverside, California group also claimed that the 2024 election in the county had nearly 34,000 more votes counted than cast.

The county’s registrar has said the group misunderstood the data it was looking at.

On Friday, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, a Republican who is running for governor, said his office launched an investigation into the November special election after receiving a complaint from the Riverside Election Integrity Team (REIT) — a coalition of self-described “concerned Riverside County citizens dedicated to upholding Article IV, Section 4 of the United States Constitution.” 

In a letter to Bianco, California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) slammed the sheriff for seizing ballots based on the bogus audit by REIT. 

“Your decision to seize ballots and begin counting them based on vague, unsubstantiated allegations about irregularities in the November special election results sets a dangerous precedent and will only sow distrust in our elections,” Bonta wrote.

Earlier this year, REIT said they conducted an audit of November’s special election and found a discrepancy of 45,800 votes between handwritten ballot intake logs and the number of votes reported to the state.

On its website, REIT — which formed some time before the 2024 election — describes its work as Riverside citizens who engage in “election observation, poll monitoring, voter-roll maintenance advocacy, evidence-based reporting, and community education, and constructive engagement with election officials.” 

It’s not the first time REIT has reported vast discrepancies in recent elections, but their findings and methods have drawn criticism from local election officials and voting rights experts. 

In addition to auditing the ballot count in the November special election, REIT claimed it found 33,888 more votes counted in Riverside County in the 2024 election than ballots that were cast. 

Greg Langworthy, a member of REIT, told a local outlet that he asked the Riverside Board of Supervisors to investigate the ballot discrepancies in both elections. 

“In every recent election, the machines are counting thousands more votes than ballots accounted for,” Langworthy said. “This has got to be explained. Why has the Board of Supervisors certified the election results? Because they were not given the records until afterward. Right now, it’s just a rubber stamp. The Proposition 50 results were off by 45,000 votes.”

When Langworthy presented these findings to the Riverside County Board of Supervisors, the county’s registrar pushed back on REIT’s audit — claiming that the group misunderstood the raw data it was pulling from. Riverside Registrar of Voters Art Tinoco reportedly said that the actual discrepancy in the 2025 special election was only 103 votes. 

REIT’s history of pushing misleading claims about voting and elections stretches back to at least before the 2024 election, when Langworthy attended an election integrity-focused board of supervisors hearing, where he pushed the board to implement changes to the way they receive mail-in ballots, along with questioning the integrity of voting machines and asking the county to have tech workers inspect the machines. 

The board of supervisors didn’t take up any of REIT’s suggestions but Riverside’s registrar of voters did certify the election in early December 2024, without any discrepancies. 

This story has been updated to reflect that the registrar of voters, not the board of supervisors, certifies Riverside’s election results.