The California Supreme Court ordered Republican Sheriff Chad Bianco in Riverside County, California, to return ballots that he illegally seized from election officials.

The New York Times reports that Bianco took about 650,000 ballots cast in California’s 2025 special election on congressional redistricting, as part of an investigation into voter fraud that California officials called baseless.

“I would underscore the seriousness of the violation here. This is not a case involving a few documents,” Associate Justice Goodwin H. Liu wrote in a concurrent opinion. “It involves the unlawful removal and handling by armed deputies of over 1,000 boxes of documents—and not just any documents, but the most precious documents of the citizenry in a democracy: their votes.”