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In the spring of 2022, a woman named Shelby Bunch began appearing at government hearings in Riverside County, demanding that officials there address what she believed was an epidemic of fraud in local elections.

Bunch often introduced herself as a representative of New California, a secessionist movement that seeks to break away from what it describes as the tyranny of a Democratic-controlled state.

She accused Riverside officials of colluding in criminal activity and warned that they would soon “be answering to law enforcement.” She once closed her comments by telling the Riverside County Board of Supervisors to “have a crappy day.”

The supervisors didn’t seem to take Bunch seriously, but she found a powerful ally in Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco.

Based on her various claims, including that the county’s electronic voting machines had been remotely manipulated, the sheriff put one of his senior investigators in charge of a criminal probe into the registrar of voters.

The investigator, Christopher Poznanski, quickly came to the conclusion that there was no evidence of a crime. On July 20, 2022, he sent Bunch an email letting her know he was closing the case.

“I understand this may not be the desired outcome,” he wrote. “But know that I did not take this case lightly and considered all of the information.”

Bunch was furious. She demanded that Poznanski investigate the “corrupt machines.”

But Poznanski was unmoved. “I respect your passion for this cause, but I will conduct no further investigation into the matter,” he wrote.

Bunch continued to write Bianco directly, urging him to reopen the case. Then, in early September, she got some help.

A figure in the “constitutional sheriff” movement, which asserts that elected sheriffs are more powerful than anyone — including the president and the courts — sent Bianco an email.

“I just heard this past week that a group of your constituents requested that you investigate election fraud in Riverside County and that your investigator was unable to find anything and you closed your investigation,” Steve Tuminello wrote to Bianco. “I know that as a Constitutional Sheriff you realize how extremely important Election Integrity is, and that you would welcome any assistance in these investigations.”

Bianco, whose career has been guided by the movement, wrote back to say he had launched another, more ambitious investigation.

Emails obtained by CalMatters trace the development of a years-long case that ultimately led to Bianco’s unprecedented seizure of 650,000 ballots in March. They reveal that his sprawling investigation was based on the thinnest of evidence and raise alarms over how the November elections could be disrupted by the unproven claims of fringe groups and ideologically aligned officials.

That scenario is particularly troubling in Riverside County, which is home to one of a few dozen  congressional districts in the country that could determine control of the U.S. House of Representatives in the midterm elections.

Bianco’s emails with Bunch also show that he doubted some of her group’s allegations.

In one exchange in 2023, Bunch suggested the county supervisors were complicit in election fraud and might have ties to drug cartels.

“This is absolutely ridiculous,” Bianco responded. “Just because ‘someone’ convinced themselves of something doesn’t mean its reality.”

Bianco told Bunch her group was “acting stupid.”

“I actually cant believe I took the time to respond,” he wrote.

Still, he pushed the investigation forward.

In a 2024 podcast interview, Bunch said the sheriff had been hamstrung by the courts. She told her host that Bianco had “tried to get a search warrant on the machines … but the judge, he just laughed. He said, ‘I’m not giving you anything.’”

Her coalition, she said, needed a judge who was ideologically aligned with Bianco.

“If we can get just one judge,” she said, “the whole dam will break.”

“Who’s gonna be the one judge that steps up?”

In 2026, she would get her answer.

‘Don’t have to ask permission from anybody’

The “constitutional sheriff” movement is rooted in the beliefs of a Southern California-based white supremacist who was active in the 1970s and 1980s and argued that sheriffs were the country’s only legitimate law enforcement officials. Its members cite the 10th Amendment, which says that powers not specifically delegated to the federal government fall to the states. The amendment, however, makes no mention of sheriffs.

The main organization behind the movement, the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, is led by a former sheriff named Richard Mack.

Since 2020, Mack has held a series of events alongside prominent election conspiracy theorists, encouraging sheriffs to investigate voter fraud in their own counties. Sheriffs, he said, “don’t have to ask permission from anybody.” As a result, many conspiracy-minded local groups have flocked to their county sheriffs for support when other officials have rejected their theories of election fraud.

Even though claims of widespread voter fraud have been debunked, these sheriffs have used their discretionary power to open investigations, many of them based on allegations that echo President Donald Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election.

Bianco, who could not be reached for comment for this story, describes himself as a constitutional sheriff and agrees with the movement’s core tenets.

He has maintained power in Riverside even as the county’s shifting demographics have altered its historically conservative political landscape. Today there are more registered Democrats in Riverside than there are Republicans. But that shift to the left has coincided with a religiously fueled radicalization on the right.

One of the key figures of that movement is Tim Thompson, the pastor of a powerful Riverside church and Bianco’s political ally. Thompson has led an effort to stack local school boards with members who have rolled back transgender student rights and rejected textbooks that mention Harvey Milk, one of the nation’s first openly gay elected officials. He recently celebrated a parishioner who was pardoned by Trump after being convicted for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Thompson has also taken an interest in the local judiciary. In 2022, he supported a former prosecutor named Jay Kiel, who was running to fill a seat on Riverside’s Superior Court.

When Kiel joined Thompson on his popular podcast, he promised to “bring a little balance back to the bench” to counteract the state’s liberal Legislature. Kiel also praised Bianco and said Riverside needed “judges that are willing to stand up and say, this is the law, and I’m going to follow it.”

He won the election.

A new group emerges

By late 2024, a new group had taken control of the effort to prove voter fraud in Riverside County. The Riverside Election Integrity Team included many of the same people who had been working closely with Bunch, but they had very different tactics.

The group’s leader, Greg Langworthy, had testified alongside Bunch for years. While he was part of the same Christian conservative circles, he rejected her antagonistic approach. Langworthy is soft-spoken and polite.

At board hearings, he wears button-down shirts and the occasional pocket protector. If Bunch was the movement’s firebrand, Langworthy is its genial middle school math teacher. He focused his group’s efforts on ballot counting, conducting audits of past elections to prove to local officials that the county’s voting system is rife with error.

Langworthy’s group asked the county registrar for records from the November 2025 election for California’s redistricting measure, Proposition 50, which passed with overwhelming support across the state and by a wide margin in Riverside. The measure redrew California’s congressional maps and gave Democrats a chance to pick up several House seats in the midterms.

Langworthy said he reviewed the data and found that the registrar’s office had counted 45,896 more ballots than it had received. His group demanded meetings with individual supervisors and asked the district attorney and the sheriff to look into the matter.

The alleged discrepancy wasn’t enough to change the election results in Riverside, and Langworthy said he was not interested in overturning the measure. “Prop. 50 just happened to be the next election,” he said.

On Feb. 10, the Riverside supervisors held a special hearing on the issue. Langworthy’s group had met with several officials but wanted to present its findings to the full board.

Hoping to lay the matter to rest, the board asked the Riverside registrar, Art Tinoco, to show the group that it had misread the data his office had provided. Tinoco said Langworthy and others had relied on raw data that did not include provisional and other ballots. The actual discrepancy between ballots cast and ballots counted, he said, was 103 — a figure independently confirmed by the Riverside Record.

Tinoco spoke for more than an hour, but members of the Riverside Election Integrity Team were not convinced. One by one they approached the podium with prepared statements, laying out their audit.

The supervisors struggled to hide their frustration. But Langworthy didn’t need the board; he had Bianco. Just one day before that hearing, an investigator from the sheriff’s office had appeared in court asking for a warrant to take hundreds of thousands of ballots from Tinoco’s office.

The judge handling the matter was Jay Kiel.

The investigator’s sworn statement, intended to justify the warrant, focused almost entirely on Langworthy’s audit and Bunch’s claims. In three years of investigating the matter, the sheriff’s office had failed to produce any of its own evidence to support a case.

Kiel signed off on the warrant and sealed it, preventing the public from seeing the justification for Bianco’s seizure of the ballots.

Over the next few weeks, Bianco’s office removed 1,500 boxes of election materials from the registrar’s office. If stacked, they would rise as high as the Empire State Building.

It was the first time in the nation’s history that a sheriff took possession of previously cast ballots.

‘You intend to ignore my directives’

The California attorney general, Rob Bonta, appears to have been caught off guard.

A day after Bianco seized the first batch of ballots, Bonta sent him a letter asking him to “pause” his investigation. Bonta wrote that he was “concerned” that Bianco had taken the boxes without probable cause that a crime had occurred.

Bianco ignored him.

A few days later Bonta sent another letter. “I learned that you intend to ignore my directives and plan to start counting the seized ballots tomorrow,” Bonta wrote. “Let me be clear: this is unacceptable.”

Bianco called a press conference to tell reporters he would continue counting ballots and that the attorney general did not have the authority to stop him. What had been a behind-the-scenes battle immediately became national news.

“I will carry out my constitutional duty to pursue justice,” Bianco said. He called the attorney general “an embarrassment to law enforcement.”

According to the California Constitution, the attorney general has “direct supervision over every district attorney and sheriff … in all matters pertaining to the duties of their respective offices.” There is no California case law directly addressing this provision.

Bianco believes he is the final authority on everything that happens in his county. In flouting Bonta’s orders, he has sparked a high-stakes legal showdown testing the constitutional separation of powers. The case is currently in front of the state Supreme Court.

Bonta didn’t file a lawsuit to try to stop Bianco until almost a month after he first learned about the ballot seizure, and only after the story exploded in the national press. At that point, according to sworn statements by investigators, Bianco’s office had already begun counting the ballots, opening about 22 boxes.

During that same period, Bonta filed at least a dozen lawsuits on other issues, many of them against the Trump administration.

A spokesperson for Bonta said the attorney general was trying to “work cooperatively with the sheriff’s office in order to better understand the basis for its investigation,” and that Bonta believed Bianco was complying with his directives.

The state’s initially tepid response, and its inability, thus far, to get Bianco to return the ballots raise concerns about how officials here will be able to protect future elections.

Bianco has already said he wouldn’t hesitate to seize ballots again, even in the June primary for California governor, when his own name will be on the ballot.

And there’s another critical election that Bianco could throw into flux: In the November midterms, the Riverside registrar will be responsible for counting a significant percentage of the ballots in California’s 48th Congressional District. Last year’s redistricting effort made the district competitive for Democrats. Of the 435 House seats nationwide, it’s one of fewer than three dozen that analysts consider too close to call. These races will ultimately determine which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives.

If Bianco takes ballots cast in the race for the California 48th, the ensuing chaos could transcend Riverside County.

A broader network

In the months before Bianco’s ballot seizure, the FBI seized reams of paper ballots cast in Fulton County, Georgia, based on debunked claims from citizen election-deniers, and sought electronic voter data from Maricopa County, Arizona, despite multiple investigations that have turned up no evidence of fraud.

The Justice Department has demanded voter information in dozens of states, leaving many attorneys general to fight those demands in court. In speeches and on social media, Trump has escalated his voter fraud claims. He has said Republicans should “nationalize the voting.”

Some of the administration officials pushing these efforts are associated with the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank that has consistently supported unverified election conspiracy theories. The founding director of the institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, John Eastman, was disbarred in California last week for being one of the legal masterminds behind the attempt to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election.

Several years ago, the Claremont Institute set its sights on sheriffs and began hosting week-long education sessions to provide them with a roadmap for promoting Trump’s brand of conservatism in their counties. Bianco attended the training, and the institute later gave him its “Sheriff of the Year” award — a bust of John Wayne — at a fundraiser in Huntington Beach.

Other sheriffs who were trained at the institute have since dedicated the resources of their offices to investigate baseless allegations of election fraud, but all of those efforts have failed.

In 2022, when it seemed as though Bianco’s investigation into Bunch’s claims had also reached a dead end, Mack’s constitutional sheriff’s organization offered the services of “an expert in cyber crimes” who could “provide Sheriffs with immutable evidence of election fraud” to help them push their investigations forward.

That expert was Gregg Phillips. Before Trump tapped him to lead emergency services at FEMA, he had a history of profiting from unfounded allegations of voter fraud, asking donors to fund his pursuit of concrete evidence and pocketing much of the money.

Recently, Phillips was back in the news with a different claim: He said he had been “teleported” against his will to a Waffle House in Rome, Georgia.

Jeanne Kuang contributed reporting for this story.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.