What to do when law enforcement demands ballots? Election officials are in the dark

When a California sheriff seized 650,000 ballots from last year’s redistricting referendum, it raised an alarming question about what was previously almost a nightmare scenario: What must election officials do if law enforcement orders them to hand over ballots?

On paper, California law provides a straightforward answer — it explicitly prohibits election materials from leaving the custody of election officials, even during a criminal investigation.

But that didn’t stop Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, a Republican who is running for California governor, from seizing the county’s ballots this February — or prevent the registrar of voters from handing them over.

When the sheriff’s department’s search warrant was unsealed, it revealed that the investigation followed the same types of conspiratorial anti-voting allegations used to justify the FBI’s unprecedented seizure of ballots cast in Georgia during the 2020 presidential election just a week earlier.



https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/what-to-do-when-law-enforcement-demands-ballots-election-officials-are-in-the-dark/