Riverside County sheriff’s investigators sought voter registration records and interviewed elections staff as part of a criminal probe into voter fraud, the county’s former registrar of voters said.
While no charges have been filed, such an investigation appears to be rare in Southern California as other sheriff’s departments in the region said they don’t investigate voter fraud allegations.
Sheriff Chad Bianco stood by such investigations and said they can restore the public’s faith in elections. But the prospect of local law enforcement investigating voter fraud worries nonprofit groups dedicated to protecting democracy, who fear such probes could scare people into not voting and bolster undeserved doubts about election results.
“Law enforcement should be focused on ensuring that election officials and voters feel safe doing their jobs and casting their ballots,” said Jared Davidson, a lawyer with Protect Democracy, a self-described anti-authoritarianism group.
“Anyone who has a uniformed member of law enforcement show up at their door and interrogate them would reasonably feel chilled from exercising their right to vote.”
Katie Reisner, senior counsel at the elections watchdog States United Democracy Center, said that she’s “not privy to the particulars of this situation, but I do think it’s important to underscore a key principle: a sheriff’s job – the job of any law enforcement professional — is to investigate credible allegations. Not just any allegations.”
“For law enforcement to use its authority to carry out investigations, there has to be a factual predicate that gives them enough reason to do so,” she said.
“And it would be very problematic for a law enforcement leader to open an investigation without that kind of predicate. This means that it is not the job of law enforcement to prove a negative, to show that a baseless conspiracy theory is, in fact, baseless.”
Bianco defended his department’s actions.
Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco said investigating voter fraud “actually helps assure residents their election should be safe and secure.” (File photo by Anjali Sharif-Paul, The Sun/SCNG)
“Much to your dismay, the Sheriff is the Chief Law Enforcement Officer in the County of Riverside,” he said in an emailed statement.
“When witnesses or victims come forward with claims of criminal conduct, the Sheriff’s Office investigates those claims.”
He said the voter fraud investigation is continuing “and no comment will be provided.”
Most people “have very little confidence in the election process,” Bianco said. “Law enforcement investigating allegations of election fraud actually helps assure residents their election should be safe and secure.”
“Only the propaganda of The Press-Enterprise and opinions of writers like yourself would make law enforcement’s involvement be seen in a negative light,” the sheriff said.
The Riverside County District attorney’s Office also has investigated voter fraud.
In 2018, prosecutors charged a then-22-year-old Riverside man with voting twice in the 2016 primary and general elections.
Brooke Beare, a spokesperson for District attorney Mike Hestrin, referred a request for comment to the sheriff.
Doubts about election outcomes and integrity persist in the wake of the 2020 election, which former President Donald Trump falsely claims was stolen from him. Conspiracy theories, spread online and by right-wing media, allege broad schemes to stuff ballot boxes and switch votes to Democratic candidates.
While there have been criminal cases of voters trying to cast multiple ballots, studies show they are extremely rare and nowhere near the scale needed to decide an election. The Associated Press found 475 potential instances of voter fraud out of 25 million votes cast in six battleground states in the 2020 presidential election.
Locally, a civil grand jury probe of the 2020 election found no evidence of fraud in Riverside County. But people have urged the Board of Supervisors to discontinue use of Dominion electronic voting machines, which are the subject of conspiracy theories about election rigging.
Bianco is among those who signed a petition demanding the machines’ removal. At the time, he said he supported “any and all efforts of audits and checks of the machines.”
In April, Fox News agreed to pay $787 million to Dominion to settle a defamation lawsuit. Lawyers for the voting machine manufacturer accused the conservative media giant of spreading lies about its machines being hacked to switch votes to President Joe Biden in 2020.
The sheriff did not respond to a question asking whether he believed the 2020 election was stolen.
Rebecca Spencer was Riverside County’s registrar of voters from 2014 until an acrimonious split with the county in September.
Responding to a Southern California News Group query, Spencer said via email that the sheriff’s office in 2022 requested “unredacted voter registration forms and vote-by-mail ballot envelopes.” She did not say how many.
Former Riverside County Registrar of Voters Rebecca Spencer said she spoke with sheriff’s investigators in September regarding the inner workings of county elections. (File photo by Cindy Yamanaka, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)
Spencer said she reviewed the request with county counsel and determined that county code did not allow for the release of voters’ signatures without a court order. The sheriff’s office sought and obtained a search warrant for that information in 2023, Spencer said, adding that her office eventually turned over the requested documents to investigators.
Spencer said she met in September with sheriff’s personnel who “shared that they were wrapping up an investigation into alleged election and voter fraud.”
“They stated that the majority of the voters in the search warrant were circumstances of father/son or relatives in the same household with similar names and had not voted twice” and that “they were forwarding a few specific cases to the District attorney for investigation,” Spencer recalled.
Investigators also asked “if the voting system was connected to the Internet … and what kind of testing we performed to make sure that it was not connected to the Internet,” Spencer said, adding she told them the machines could not be accessed online.
“The sheriff staff stated that (county information technology) staff had confirmed what I told them,” she said. “I am not aware of any search warrants to check the machines.”
Sheriff’s investigators also interviewed IT employees about the county’s voting system and ballot-counting room, Spencer said.
“They asked me some questions about how we perform logic and accuracy testing on the voting system and how we transmit results directly to the Secretary of State,” she said, adding that sheriff’s staff ended the meeting “by stating that they found no evidence of election fraud in Riverside County.”
Spencer said it was the only time the sheriff’s office requested voter records during her tenure. Bianco, a Republican and elected official, took office in 2019.
In the region, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department appears to stand alone in its voter fraud investigation.
Spokespeople for sheriff’s departments in Los Angeles, Orange and San Bernardino counties said their agencies do not investigate allegations of voter or election malfeasance and leave those matters to federal authorities or the district attorney.
Bob Page, a former San Bernardino County registrar of voters who now holds the same job in Orange County, said via email that, in his experience, the district attorney or secretary of state investigates criminal allegations about voting, voter registration and signature gathering for ballot measure petitions.
“Elections officials have developed good working relationships with law enforcement agencies at the federal, state, and local levels,” he said. “We have shared information about the administration of elections and sought input regarding how to keep our elections safe and secure.”
Melissa Eickman, spokesperson for the San Bernardino County elections office, said via email that she’s not aware of any voter fraud investigations or requests to inspect voting machines by her county’s sheriff’s department. Any suspected voter fraud is referred to the district attorney, California’s Secretary of State or both, she added.
The LA County elections office did not respond to a request for comment.
Reisner, of the States United Democracy Center, worries what effect law enforcement probes of voter fraud will have on the public’s confidence in elections.
“As we’ve seen in the past couple of election cycles across the country, unfounded conspiracy theories of election theft have a tremendous corrosive effect on institutions of democracy,” she said. “They can give rise to significant disruption of election processes; harassment, intimidation, and threats against election officials; and even violence.”
Reisner added: “That’s why it’s very important that law enforcement leaders are only investigating credible allegations and not giving oxygen to unfounded claims.”
Davidson, of Protect Democracy ,said Bianco must understand “that he does not have some sort of supreme authority or sort of carte blanche to pursue these investigations” and that state and federal law, including the Voting Rights Act of 1965, impose “important guardrails” on such investigations.
Most law enforcement officials “care deeply about not sowing distrust in our elections,” he said.
“But even a handful of election deniers in office who engage in these kinds of pretextual investigations can cause significant harm to trust in elections, not just locally but also nationwide.”
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