National anti-voting group inspired California ballot seizure 

Last week, newly unsealed search warrants shed light on the local anti-voting activists who inspired Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco to seize 650,000 ballots from California’s 2025 redistricting election. 

But key figures from the group whose flawed, conspiracy-driven data led to Bianco’s ballot seizure were trained by Unite4Freedom, a national anti-voting group that has filed scores of lawsuits promoting false conspiracy theories about mass voter fraud.

The connection underscores how, as the midterms approach, an army of trained anti-voting activists is in place to press law enforcement and other officials to take steps to assert control over elections and spread fear about voting.

In February, Republican gubernatorial candidate Bianco seized more than half a million ballots in California’s redistricting special election. Search warrants say he acted on claims from a local anti-voting activist group, the Riverside Election Integrity Team (REIT). The group alleged large discrepancies between ballots cast and counted. 

It’s not the first claim of bogus voting by REIT; in the 2024 election, the group said the county had nearly 34,000 more votes counted than cast. But in both cases, the county registrar said the figures stem from the anti-voting activists’ misunderstanding of raw election data.

Throughout 2024, Unite4Freedom trained scores of volunteers to audit their respective states’ voter rolls for fraud and scrutinize election processes. It also filed lawsuits in scores of states, based on its own volunteers’ research, alleging major problems with state voter rolls. But an analysis by a pro-democracy group found that Unite4Freedom had grave flaws in its methodology and lacked the expertise to train volunteers to properly analyze election data.

The anti-voting group also trained volunteers to pressure election officials to sign a pledge to administer a “legally valid” election.

Key members of REIT were among those Unite4Freedom volunteers. 

In March and April 2024, Unite4Freedom convinced the Riverside Board of Supervisors to hold a series of “election integrity workshops,” according to local reporting. The workshops were unsuccessful in swaying the board to pass any election integrity measures. But one of the Unite4Freedom organizers in attendance was Shelby Bunch, a REIT member who is also active with New California State, a movement to secede the conservative areas of California from the rest of the state. 

In October 2024, Bunch served the board with a cease-and-desist order in an attempt to stop the 2024 election. That came after the board dismissed data presented at the two Unite4Freedom workshops.

And Bunch isn’t the only REIT member with ties to Unite4Freedom.

On Sept. 24, 2024, Greg Langworthy — another REIT member and Unite4Freedom volunteer whose work led to Bianco’s raid — attended a Temecula City Council meeting with Bunch to get the council to sign Unite4Freedom’s draft “resolution for a legally valid 2024 election.” They cited data from the group that, they said, proved flaws in the state’s electoral system. 

“Today we come to you as concerned citizens sharing alarming information about our state’s voter roll database,” Bunch said. 

Since then, Langworthy has popped up at numerous Riverside Board of Supervisors meetings asking them to investigate alleged ballot discrepancies in both the 2024 election and the 2025 special election.  

“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.”

But the board pushed back on REIT’s audit, claiming that the group misunderstood the raw data it was pulling from. 

The Riverside Board of Supervisors may have ignored Langworthy’s claims but the anti-voting activist had a sympathetic ear in Bianco. Three warrants — dated Feb. 9, Feb. 23 and March 19 — show that the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department relied on fraud claims from Langworthy to assert probable cause.