EAP Files Petition with the CA Supreme Court
Will they preserve the ballots for the people and
launch a Riverside County audit investigation?
On Monday, Election Accountability Project asked the California Supreme Court to keep Riverside County’s election records from being destroyed. On Thursday, that same Court told Attorney General Rob Bonta he has the power to stop Sheriff Chad Bianco from investigating the very evidence local citizens brought him. Those two events are not a coincidence. They are the reason this case exists.
EAP’s petition, Supreme Court No. S298700, followed a simple path. In August, EAP sued Registrar of Voters Art Tinoco and the County to preserve records from the November 2024 General Election and the November 2025 Proposition 50 special election, and to require the reconciliation California law already demands. A temporary restraining order was granted, then lifted. The Court of Appeal refused to put the preservation order back.
On Monday, EAP took the question to the Supreme Court: the paper should still exist while a court decides whether the registrar performed the canvass the Elections Code requires. Two days later the Court ruled on Bonta v. Bianco. It held that the Attorney General may issue binding directives to a county sheriff and that Bianco must comply with Bonta’s order to halt the Prop 50 investigation. In the companion case, Cervantes v. Bianco, the Court held the sheriff’s seizure of voted ballots was unlawful, despite lawful subpoenas issued by a Magistrate, and ordered those packages returned to the registrar.
CA Supreme Court Case S298700
Read that pairing carefully. The citizens brought documents to local law enforcement. The sheriff opened an investigation. The state’s chief lawyer shut it down. The highest court in California said he could.
We do not pretend the Court invented that power. Article V, section 13 of the California Constitution gives the Attorney General “direct supervision over every district attorney and sheriff.” The justices applied that text. What they also did, as a practical matter, is remove the one local official who had agreed to look at what voters in this county actually found. If a sheriff cannot examine evidence his own constituents put in his hands because Sacramento has already decided the matter is closed, then “local control” is a slogan. It is not reality.
Bonta has never sat down with the citizens who did the work.
The citizens who completed the audits and the volunteers who later organized as Election Accountability Project did not invent a rumor. They pulled public records. They added vote-center ballot statements, collection forms, and mail-intake logs. They compared that paper to the certified totals. For the November 2025 special election the gap they could not close was 45,896. For the November 2024 General Election the same method produced a gap of 33,888. The full reports are on our site: the 2024 General Election Audit Report and the Prop 50 Special Election Audit Report. Notice the trend?
The registrar’s answer has been consistent. Those paper forms are “imprecise.” The official reconciliation lives in EIMS, the county’s computer voter-and-ballot tracking system, Elections Code section 15302 says the official canvass shall include a reconciliation of roster signatures with the ballot statements, and, if that fails, of ballots received with ballots cast as recorded on those statements. The results of the 2024 General Election Roster Audit found 128 out of 150 rosters for in-person voters did not reconcile. The Elections Code references the PAPER. The county admits it uses the computer systems exclusively. The computer results do not match the paper. That is the dispute.
Art Tinoco, Registrar of Voters
The law suit is not a demand to overturn certified results. It is a demand the registrar explain why the PAPER records do not agree with the computer records. An investigation into the two audits cannot be performed without the records. In the event the AG directs the sheriff to complete the investigation he started, the records must also be preserved.
Bonta closed the criminal path without interviewing the people who created the files. He issued conclusions about a citizen audit he did not sit through. He ignored the fact EAP thoroughly debunked all the registrar’s claims regarding the legitimacy of the audits and use of the paper records. He has the authority the Court just confirmed. Authority is not the same thing as the responsible acts of questioning a single volunteer how the numbers were derived, verifying their work, or why the paper and EIMS diverge.
If the Attorney General is now the only official allowed to decide whether this evidence is worth a look, he can start by looking at the people who collected it. We are not the government. This citizen funded lawsuit was required because the people paid to serve them failed to act.
The registrar would not produce the forms in time to check the canvass. The Attorney General would not hear the auditors out. The sheriff was told to stop. So residents hired a lawyer, filed in superior court, lost the emergency stay, and on Monday asked the Supreme Court not to let the records disappear while the legal question is still open.
S298700 does not reopen Bonta. It does not give the sheriff the ballots back. It asks only that voted-ballot packages and the related canvass records remain in official custody, unopened, until a court decides whether a reconciliation that ignores the paper the Code requires is a reconciliation at all.If the Attorney General wants this to end, he can do one responsible thing his office has not done: sit with the citizens, go through the 2024 and 2025 reports line by line, and explain on the record why the paper does not matter. Until that happens, the public is being asked to accept a closed investigation of evidence the state refused to examine and records the county still wants to destroy.
What is he afraid of ?
As of today, the petition is pending with the CA Supreme Court. The audits are public.
The people who paid for this case are still here waiting to be heard.
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