Records from November’s special election, seized by the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department as part of a criminal investigation, were posted online for five days in a major security beach, allege lawyers who sued to get those records back.
In a Tuesday, April 28 letter to the California Supreme Court, attorneys for the UCLA Voting Rights Project wrote that “confidential material” was publicly accessible through an online link created by counsel for Republican gubernatorial candidate and Sheriff Chad Bianco.
The letter did not specify which lawyer allegedly exposed the records, why this was done or what those records were.
However, in an April 3 email, Bianco’s attorney, Robert Tyler, indicated that information such as voters’ addresses, emails and phone numbers may have been inadvertently made publicly accessible through a court filing.
According to an email Tyler wrote to Riverside County Registrar of Voters Art Tinoco, Tyler on March 29 filed a declaration in Riverside Superior Court that included three emails between himself and the state attorney general’s office.
One of those emails, Tyler wrote, “referenced a link to my OneDrive that I was making available to (the attorney general) to comply with his request.” OneDrive is an online storage service for documents, photos and other data.
Tyler wrote that he filed a similar declaration with the California Supreme Court on April 1.
“Unfortunately, on April 2, 2026, I learned that the link in the email I filed could be used to access the OneDrive file by anyone who had the link,” Tyler wrote. “Once this fact was learned, access through the OneDrive link was immediately halted.”
He added: “We are still investigating the full extent of how much access was made to that OneDrive account and what files may have been at issue.”
At least one of the files, Tyler wrote, contained voter roll information for county voters, including names, party affiliations, addresses, emails and phone numbers. The OneDrive was publicly accessible for about five days, he added.
“The Sheriff’s Department is investigating that access, and we hope to provide additional information on exactly what was accessed and with whom it was associated,” Tyler wrote to the registrar. “ … At this time, we are not aware of any malicious use of any of the data in the files found in the OneDrive account.”
The voting rights project argues that the breach shows why “ballots and election materials cannot be taken out of the hands of election officials and handled outside the safeguards established by California law,” Sonni Waknin, a project attorney, said in a statement.
“With primary voting beginning in a few days, the Court should act quickly to reaffirm that ballot custody, security, and review must remain under lawful election procedures and not be left to ad hoc actions by law enforcement,” the statement continued.
Tyler, Bianco’s attorney in the continuing court fight over the investigation, did not respond to requests for comment.
The alleged breach adds another twist to a heated legal battle between Bianco and those who want to stop his investigation into ballots cast by Riverside County voters in the Proposition 50 statewide special election.
The ballot measure, which passed in the county and California as a whole, redrew congressional maps to give Democrats an advantage in the upcoming midterm elections.
A citizen watchdog group called the Riverside Election Integrity Team said there’s a 45,000-vote gap in Riverside County between ballots received and ballots counted for the Proposition 50 election. Tinoco has said that the figure is wrong and that the actual gap is just 103 votes.
In February and March, Bianco’s investigators took out search warrants to seize more than 650,000 ballots cast by county voters in November, along with other county documents from that election.
Bianco, who doesn’t dispute the election’s outcome, said his department wants to count the ballots to see if the 45,000-vote gap exists and if so, what caused it.
Critics, including California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Attorney General Rob Bonta — both Democrats — condemned the ballot seizure as unprecedented and dangerous, insisting that sheriff’s investigators lack the training and experience to handle ballots in a way that doesn’t spoil them.
Bonta has said the investigation is based on falsehoods, is procedurally flawed and could undermine the public’s faith in elections. Bianco countered that he has an obligation to investigate malfeasance and that Bonta is “an embarrassment to law enforcement.”
Bonta has gone to court to stop the investigation. On April 8, the state Supreme Court paused the probe pending further judicial review.
The voting rights project, which fights for “equitable and accessible voting for all Americans,” according to its website, filed its own lawsuit against Bianco seeking to return the seized ballots to the registrar’s office.
Tyler is founder of Murrieta-based Advocates for Faith & Freedom, which oftens handles litigation involving Christian conservatives. In court papers, he wrote that he became Bianco’s lawyer after the Riverside County counsel’s office, which normally represents the sheriff in court, indicated it couldn’t represent Bianco on the issue because it’s also the registrar’s lawyer.
On April 14, Riverside County supervisors voted 4-1 — Supervisor Karen Spiegel was in the minority — not to pay Bianco’s legal bills stemming from lawsuits over the investigation.