These emails show what drove Chad Bianco’s ballot seizure

Using years of internal emails, reporters Anat Rubin and Jessica Pishko have traced the development of the 4-year-old case that ultimately led to Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco’s unprecedented seizure of 650,000 ballots in March.

The emails show that:

• The case began when a group came to Bianco with a slate of election fraud allegations in 2022. One of the sheriff’s senior investigators looked into the claims and quickly came to the conclusion that there was no evidence of a crime. He closed the case. 

• After being contacted later that year by the “constitutional sheriffs” movement, Bianco said he’d reopened the investigation. The movement has pushed unproven election conspiracies and argues that elected sheriffs are the highest law in the land, more powerful than the president or courts. It has been central to Bianco’s career. 

• But the emails show that the sheriff had his doubts about the citizen sleuths supplying the claims. “This is absolutely ridiculous,” Bianco responded after the group’s leader suggested the county supervisors were complicit in election fraud and may have ties to drug cartels. “Just because ‘someone’ convinced themselves of something doesn’t mean its reality.”

• In three years of investigating the matter, the sheriff’s office didn’t produce any of its own evidence to support the case. In information provided to the courts to justify its warrant, Bianco’s investigator focused almost entirely on information provided by the citizen groups. 

The emails “reveal that his sprawling investigation was based on the thinnest of evidence, and raise alarms over how the November elections could be disrupted by the unproven claims of fringe groups and ideologically aligned officials,” according to Anat and Jessica.

Bianco’s connection to the constitutional sheriffs movement highlights his refusal to cede control of the investigation to California Attorney General Rob Bonta, even though the state’s constitution gives the attorney general “direct supervision” over sheriffs. 

“The state’s initially tepid response, and its inability, thus far, to get Bianco to return the ballots, raises concerns about how officials here will be able to protect future elections,” the reporters write.

Read more.

Uber is required under Proposition 22 to allow rideshare drivers to appeal their deactivation when they’re kicked off the platform. But some drivers say the company isn’t complying, writes CalMatters’ Levi Sumagaysay.

In 2020 voters approved Prop. 22, which lets Uber and other companies classify their workers as independent contractors rather than employees. While this enables Uber to provide more limited workplace benefits, the company is supposed to set up “mandatory contractual rights and appeal processes,” according to Prop 22’s text.

But in a lawsuit filed Monday, a drivers group that says it has about 20,000 members in California is accusing Uber of violating this provision. 

Many deactivated drivers report that when they try to appeal their deactivation cases, they’re guided to talking with bots, and then to agents who read from scripts and are working from another country. 

• Mirwais Noory, a deactivated driver from the Bay Area who said Uber kicked him off the app in 2024: “I’m the only one with income. It has turned my life upside down.”

Read more.

An audit has found that popular internet websites are ignoring a California law requiring them to comply with a tool that prohibits them from selling or sharing the personal information of visitors, reports CalMatters’ Colin Lecher.

Global Privacy Control is a tool that online users can turn on through a setting in their browsers that tells the websites they visit not to sell or share their user data. The California Consumer Privacy Act requires companies to acknowledge GPC and to not track users who use it. 

But major companies may be ignoring the law, according to researchers at webXray, a privacy analysis platform: Google continued to track users in 86% of instances despite receiving the GPC signal, Meta in 69% and Microsoft in 50%.

The tech companies deny any wrongdoing. But if the California Privacy Protection Agency fined all of the websites found in violation of the law, it could lead to billions of dollars in penalties, according to webXray.

Read more.

Former California State Controller Betty Yee said Monday that she is ending her campaign for governor. Yee was one of the earliest candidates to join the race, but throughout her run she never garnered the support of more than about 3% of likely voters. Said Yee: “Even some of my former supporters just felt like they needed to move on as well.” Read more from CalMatters’ Jeanne Kuang.