Baseless Allegations Drive Law Enforcement Seizures of Election Records

In March, Sheriff Chad Bianco of Riverside County, California seized from county election officials more than 650,000 ballots cast in the November 2025 redistricting election. Bianco, a Republican candidate for governor of California, intends to investigate alleged fraud.

The seizure follows a new playbook for election denial: Amateur, citizen activists claim election fraud. Refutations of the claims or contradictory evidence are ignored. These same unfounded claims are used as the basis of official law enforcement action. This troubling trend could fuel further election conspiracies, drain law enforcement resources, and undermine confidence in elections.

The scenario also played out in January when the FBI executed a search warrant in Fulton County, Georgia, and took hundreds of boxes of ballots and other election materials from the county’s storage facility. The FBI’s warrant application shows that the raid relied on already-debunked claims about the 2020 presidential election.

And in March, a federal grand jury subpoenaed records from the partisan audit conducted by an outside group of the Maricopa County, Arizona, 2020 election — an audit that has been rebutted in multiple subsequent reports. President Trump celebrated online the ensuing FBI seizure in Maricopa County.

This analysis dives deeper into each of the three cases.

Riverside County, California

More than 650,000 voters in Riverside County cast a ballot on Proposition 50 last fall, determining whether to enact a redistricting proposal that would draw congressional maps favorable to Democrats in California. Registered Democrats in the county outnumber Republicans by 86,000, and votes in favor of redistricting outnumbered votes against by more than 82,000 votes. Statewide, the proposition won by more than 3.3 million votes, with more than 64 percent in favor.

Following the election, the Riverside Election Integrity Team, a local group that purports to work to prevent voter fraud, alleged that Riverside County election workers had inflated the count by 45,000 votes.

The county addressed their concerns. On February 10, the county’s chief election official, Art Tinoco, and his deputy gave a 40-minute presentation at a public meeting to address Riverside Election Integrity Team’s allegations and explain where the group erred in its assessment of election reports.  

According to Tinoco, the group’s audit relied on raw data, including “ballot statements” that are estimates from poll workers of how many ballots they have received. The group also erred by using the approximated numbers from vote-by-mail “intake forms,” which are not required by law but are used to inform the public of estimated vote totals as mail ballots are processed.

Tinoco also provided a chart with the variance rates between original counts and recounts in other large California counties. The rates ranged from 0.008 percent to 0.36 percent, all much lower than the 2 percent margin to trigger a recount in California. Riverside County’s variance rate fell squarely within the typical variance range for California.

Despite this in-depth, public explanation, Bianco seized the county’s ballots the next month and continues to put more trust in the amateur efforts of the local “election integrity” group than in the detailed explanations of Riverside’s election staff.

Fulton County, Georgia

The events in Riverside County were similar to the well-publicized FBI raid less than two months earlier in Fulton County. Soon after the FBI raided the Georgia county’s election offices, ProPublica reported that the FBI’s theories of criminal wrongdoing might have stemmed from a 263-page report written by several well-known election conspiracists. Cleta Mitchell, who served as an attorney in Trump’s original efforts to undermine the 2020 election results in Georgia, connected the raid to the same report.

The report contains 26 “counts” that allege wrongdoing by Fulton County election officials in 2020. But the report ignores previous professional investigations into the 2020 election and misunderstands basic safeguards in Georgia elections.

For example, the report raises suspicion around Fulton County’s order of one million extra absentee ballots. While the report concedes that ordering extra paper isn’t illegal, the authors write that, because the ballots were not ordered in time to be delivered to absentee voters, “All plausible known reasons for this order have been eliminated.”

In fact, Fulton County officials ordered the extra ballots as a safeguard against potential problems created by the COVID-19 pandemic or disputed tabulation equipment. Keeping a sufficient supply of emergency paper ballots on hand is required under Georgia law. Ordering a very large supply in 2020 was in line with what the Brennan Center and local groups had publicly advocated, given the pandemic and recent occurrences of long lines in the state.

The report also alleges that Fulton County used the wrong type of ballot paper in 2020. For its evidence, the report offers one ballot allegedly printed on the wrong type of paper — and it’s from Spalding County, Georgia, not Fulton County. Further, the ballot is from the 2022 election, not the 2020 election.  

And yet, the FBI based a criminal investigation on these and other easily debunked claims.

Maricopa County, Arizona

In 2020, Maricopa County served as an epicenter of election denial after Joe Biden won Arizona by a small margin. A statutorily required audit of a sample of ballots, completed by hand by bipartisan representatives, showed a “100% match” with the machine count.

However, the Arizona Senate decided to hire an outside firm to complete its own audit of the results. Bucking the advice of the secretary of state to choose a firm that met basic standards of neutrality and competence, the senate hired Cyber Ninjas, which was led by a participant in the “Stop the Steal” conspiracy movement.

Cyber Ninjas released a report riddled with errors and easily disproven claims of fraud. For example, Cyber Ninjas claimed that 5,295 voters potentially voted in multiple counties. To make this claim, Cyber Ninjas simply looked for Arizona voters who shared a first, middle, and last name and birth year with another voter in the 2020 election. The “Birthday Problem,” a basic statistical concept, explains how common it is for two people to share a birth date, month, and year, let alone just a year.

Despite widely available refutations of Cyber Ninjas’ claims, Maricopa County’s 2020 election is once again in the crosshairs of the election denial movement, and the efforts of Cyber Ninjas are somehow seen as a basis for action.

And now a grand jury has subpoenaed videos, photos, and documents from this faulty audit. In addition to the false claims throughout the materials, they are compromised by the Cyber Ninjas’ failure to follow chain of custody procedures that prevent tampering. These materials are now in FBI custody.

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Election administration is complex, and occasionally mistakes or oversights occur. Election officials prepare for things to go wrong, because that’s what professionals do. They follow laws that require recounts. They share in-depth results with the public. And sometimes they even attend public meetings to address concerns. It’s reasonable to seek transparency in how our elections are run, but not to launch a criminal investigation based on false claims that have been thoroughly addressed.

Stephen Richer is a legal fellow at the Cato Institute, the CEO of Republic Affairs, and the former elected Maricopa County Recorder.