Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, who is a leading Republican candidate for governor, has seized more than 650,000 ballots from last November’s election and is investigating whether they were fraudulently counted.

“This investigation is simple: Physically count the ballots and compare that result with the total votes recorded,” Bianco said at a news conference Friday.

The unusual probe drew a sharp rebuke from California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, who said in a statement Friday that it is “unprecedented in both scope and scale” and appears “not to be based on facts or evidence.”

  • SnarkoPolo@lemmy.world
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    11 hours ago

    The Media: “Our top story today, OMYGAWD The Bachelorette has been cancelled! But first SPORTS!”

  • FlyingCircus@lemmy.world
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    12 hours ago

    So now the fascist GOP knows how 600k Californians voted? I guess we better hope that the guy in charge isn’t vindictive about people not supporting him.

    • Warl0k3@lemmy.world
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      11 hours ago

      As I understand it (have friends that deal with this data), the ballots are anonymized so they can’t back-associate the voting records to real ids. So at least there’s that.

  • ghostBones@lemmy.world
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    22 hours ago

    There needs to be a law that candidates cannot do their own election investigations or seize anything whatsoever or in any way tread upon the election process, it belongs to the people not the candidates. They can and will use established methods for challenging elections or suffer the consequences of becoming a felon.

    • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
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      14 hours ago

      I say we make copies of all the ballots and just make them public record. Anyone can access and do recounts or analysis or whatever.

    • Not_mikey@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      22 hours ago

      They already sort of are and that’s a good thing. The way some elections work is there’s a representative from both parties observing and counting the ballots. Then they can both check each other’s work and make sure everything’s above board.

      This is why the whole election denial stuff is even more bullshit, they have official observers in there who can blow the whistle if they see anything but they never do. So they just rely on “reports” of other outside observers who think every truck moving around a polling spot is full of fraudulent ballots.

      It probably shouldn’t be just election workers as they’re just selected by whoever applies to a temp job for a day or two, and it wouldn’t take much for all those people to just happen to be partisans

      • AA5B@lemmy.world
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        14 hours ago

        That works during the election but what about this investigation? What keeps this guy from manipulating the evidence? He’s clearly neither objective nor trustworthy

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    1 day ago

    Does California not have state troopers? Shouldn’t they be arresting the guy? For tampering with evidence if it’s a real investigation. For stealing public records otherwise.

  • VitoRobles@lemmy.today
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    1 day ago

    If you call 911 for BS, you may end up in legal trouble and have to pay a hefty fine for wasting resources.

    Why the hell are these GOP cucks continuing to call every election they lose a fake and waste resources on this?

  • manxu@piefed.social
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    2 days ago

    Anything to sow doubts about the election! Tax payers are funding this, of course.

    • youcantreadthis@quokk.au
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      1 day ago

      Its really sad that killing cops would not meaningfully fix any of our many many problems, because it would be so easy.

      • MinnesotaGoddam@lemmy.world
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        15 hours ago

        I have the stupid and cannot follow your logic. Why or why not? Easy, duh, we have numbers, but like my brain says short term it causes way more problems than it might solve

  • cøre@leminal.space
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    2 days ago

    Normalizing actions like this so when he loses he can seize the ballots and claim what he wants as the election result