GOP leader slams pro-Trump sheriff as he seizes hundreds of thousands of votes

Jon Fleishman, who previously led the California Republican Party as its executive director, slammed Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco on Monday after his office announced it had seized more than 650,000 ballots cast in a 2025 statewide election as part of a fraud investigation — a probe Fleishman called "politically motivated.”

Bianco, an ally to President Donald Trump who’s also running as a Republican for California governor, announced the probe last Friday, citing reports from an activist group that claimed voter irregularities existed in California’s Proposition 50, a referendum overwhelmingly supported by voters that will allow California to redraw its congressional districts.

For Fleishman, however, the probe had no merit.

“It looks to me like it’s a politically motivated effort,” Fleishman said, speaking with New York Times.

“It’s awfully coincidental that he would be taking this high-profile and extreme of an action literally two months before he’s facing a statewide election.”

Fleishman wasn’t the only critic of Bianco’s fraud probe. California Secretary of State Shirley Weber also condemned it as meritless, and said it lacked “credible evidence” and risked “undermining public confidence” in California’s elections.

“Investigations into election processes must be conducted by those with the appropriate legal authority and subject matter expertise,” she said in a statement released after the probe was announced. “Similar claims raised in other states by individuals without election administration experience have been thoroughly reviewed and debunked.”

The activist group is known as the Riverside Election Integrity Team, a volunteer-based group that claimed tens of thousands more ballots were counted in the referendum than what were “documented as having been received,” the Times reported, though election officials chalked up the group’s claims to a basic misunderstanding of how ballots are counted.