Opinion

April 11, 2026

Finding Common Ground in California 

A common experience for many Californians is shopping at Costco and having to produce a receipt before exiting the store.  The Costco employee counts the number of items in the shopping cart to confirm the accuracy of the receipt.   This is a very transparent and practical accounting practice: trust but verify. 

This practice is very similar to how the Riverside Election Integrity Team checked the accuracy of the Proposition 50 Special Election as well as the 2024 General Election.  We requested all the ballot collection logs (the ballot receipts) from these two elections and compared the ballot counts recorded on these receipts to the vote count produced by the voting machines.  In the 2024 General Election, the audit team found 33,888 more votes were counted by the voting machines and in the Proposition 50 Election the number was 45,896 more votes than the number recorded on the ballot receipts. 

Responding to these audit results, the Attorney General’s lawyers believe the REIT audits are not credible evidence justifying an investigation:  the AG has “…serious concerns as to whether ‘probable cause’ existed to support issue of the warrants” because “the sheriff’s misguided investigation is predicated on baseless claims of election irregularities….”  The Registrar of Voters believes these “irregularities” can be explained by possible ballot counting errors made  by his election officials: they did not record accurate ballot counts on their logs. However, the Registrar and the rest of us will not truly know what is correct until the physical ballots are counted.  

Attorney General Bonta’s attorneys admit in their legal brief to the California Supreme Court, “Nothing prevents law enforcement, including a Sheriff, from performing a properly authorized criminal investigation but when they do so, election materials must nevertheless be handled with care including by following chain or custody an public inspection requirements provided by law…” (PETITION FOR  WRIT OF MANDATE…. , March 25, 2026).  

REIT agrees with the Attorney General that this investigation, the counting of the physical ballots, must be done in a transparent and verifiably accurate manner.    Our team has suggested that the counting be live-streamed and recorded for the public and/or in the presence of witnesses from different political parties.    

Attorney General Bonta, Sheriff Bianco, and all California citizens can find common ground with an opinion given by the Supreme Court in 2006, “Confidence in the integrity of our electoral process is essential to the functioning of our participatory democracy” (Purcell v. Gonzalez, 549 U.S. 1,4.).  A transparent and verifiably accurate count of the ballots will earn the confidence of Riverside County citizens no matter the political party.  

The goal of the Riverside Election Integrity Team is to help our county become an example of election integrity for our state.  Using the Costco model, we have asked the Sheriff to count the ballots in the boxes to check if the ballot count on the receipts matches the number of physical ballots in the boxes.    This is the way the county can test its election system to see if it is producing accurate results: trust but verify. 

The Proposition 50 Election audit and its supporting documents are critical evidence justifying the Sheriff’s investigation, especially since the ballots would have been destroyed in a matter of weeks. 

REIT believes every American wants to protect the sanctity of our election system in order to preserving our Democracy and set an example to the world. 

Greg Langworthy 

Riverside Election Integrity Team