For 35 years, I carried a badge in San Diego County. I learned that the most powerful thing a peace officer does is sign a sworn statement and ask a judge to trust it. The judge cannot check every fact, so the system only works when officers tell the whole truth, including the parts that weaken their case.
That is why the California Supreme Court’s decision on Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco cannot be the end of this story. Reasonable suspicion now exists to open a criminal investigation into how his office obtained 650,000 election ballots.
Last Thursday, the court unanimously ruled that Bianco broke state law by seizing the ballots from the November 2025 Proposition 50 election and ordered them returned. The justices made clear that voted ballots stay with election officials, even during a criminal investigation. The court also found he was wrong to ignore Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s order to pause.
Returning the ballots is not enough. We still do not know how his office persuaded a judge to approve an unlawful seizure.
The warrants, unsealed after CalMatters and other outlets went to court, should trouble anyone. Investigators had no insider tips, no witnesses and no forensic analysis. They relied mainly on an activist group’s claim that about 46,000 more ballots were certified than were cast. Days before the judge signed the last two warrants, the county registrar told supervisors the group had misunderstood the data.
Proposition 50 passed in Riverside County by roughly 80,000 votes, so even that number could not have changed the result. No prosecutor signed off on the affidavits, though that review is common in California. And the judge who signed them had been endorsed by Bianco when he ran for the bench.
Start with whether the judge was told the whole truth. These facts are specific and documented, and together they meet the reasonable-suspicion standard every officer is trained to recognize. A criminal investigation should begin with a few plain questions. Who wrote and reviewed the affidavits? When the registrar challenged the group’s numbers, was the judge told before the later warrants were signed? Were the explanations from election officials presented fairly, or left out? And what messages passed between sheriff’s personnel and the activists pushing the fraud claims?
This is not political. Officers who mislead judges to get warrants have been prosecuted under Republican and Democratic administrations alike.
In 2006, Atlanta narcotics officers swore that an informant had bought cocaine at the home of Kathryn Johnston, a 92-year-old woman. The informant had never been there. Johnston was killed in the raid, and three officers went to federal prison for terms of five to ten years.
In 2019, Houston officer Gerald Goines invented a heroin purchase to get a warrant for the home of Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas, both killed in the raid. He is serving 60 years for felony murder and last month pleaded guilty to federal civil rights charges over his false affidavit.
Those cases ended in tragedy, but the crime was the lie told to the judge. This July, a former Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy got a year in federal prison for lying on a warrant application to track a private client’s estranged husband. No one was hurt, and he still went to prison.
The court did not find perjury or conspiracy in the ballots case, and every person deserves due process and the presumption of innocence. But reasonable suspicion is not proof. It is the point where investigators are expected to start asking questions, and that point has been reached. If an ordinary citizen were in this position, investigators would gather the emails, texts and drafts to learn who knew what and when. A sheriff deserves that same process, no more and no less.
That work cannot be done by Bianco’s own office. It belongs with independent investigators and prosecutors. Bonta has promised legal consequences. Californians should hold him to it and insist the work be careful, open and free of political theater.
Behind the number 650,000 are real people: a retiree who mailed her ballot the day it arrived, a young person voting for the first time, a veteran who never misses an election. Each trusted the law to keep their ballot safe, and each deserves to know whether anyone misled a judge to break that trust.
The ballots must go back. The criminal investigation into how they were taken should begin now.
David A. Myers is a retired commander in the San Diego Sheriff’s Office with 35 years of service. He served as director of safety and security at Jewish Family Service of San Diego from 2023 to 2025.
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