The liberal voting rights outlet Democracy Docket exposed a pattern of extreme anti-voting and conspiracy theorist beliefs by Chad Bianco, the pro-Trump sheriff of Riverside County, California, who is currently running for governor.
Bianco is currently in a high-profile clash with California state officials after he seized 650,000 ballots from the Proposition 50 referendum, which established a new mid-decade congressional map to draw out five Republicans in retaliation for GOP efforts to do the same to Democrats in Texas. Even some Republican leaders in the state have condemned his actions.
But Bianco's seizure of ballots, evidently to try to investigate baseless allegations of fraud, is part of a broader pattern of his disdain for democracy.
"'That’s why some people should never be allowed to vote,' the sheriff wrote Wednesday in response to a commentary video about the Iran war on the social media site," said the report. This "wasn't an isolated incident," the report said, as "Over the past months, Bianco published numerous comments and posts on social media promoting false claims that elections are rigged and Democrats rely on illegal voters to win races."
Among other things, Bianco also claimed that Democrats have “created an environment where cheating and illegal voting is keeping them in office,” and that “Non citizens can vote, you can vote for someone else even if they are dead, people can vote multiple times with different names.”
There is no evidence to support any of this; all of these things are illegal and have been prosecuted in the rare cases they have occurred.
Bianco, who has been characterized by opponents as having one of the worst crime-solving records and some of the deadliest jails in California, is a former member of the Oath Keepers paramilitary and is affiliated with the "Constitutional Sheriffs" movement, a fringe group that believes God delegates divine legal authority to sheriffs to overrule federal law they disapprove of. In 2024, this group was preparing a scheme to block Democrats from taking power if they won the election.
