Embracing election conspiracies could sink a Kansas sheriff who once looked invulnerable

DE SOTO, Kan. — The sheriff in Kansas’ most populous county faced no opposition to his re-election four years ago, extending a decades-long Republican hold on the office despite big local gains by Democrats during the Trump era, when he took on election fraud as a cause.

The GOP in Johnson County in the Kansas City area is deeply divided over Sheriff Calvin Hayden’s decision research for at least two years to what he calls dozens of tips about possible election irregularities, but so far no criminal charges have been filed.

Hayden is locked in a tight race ahead of Tuesday’s primary, and Democrats are optimistic about their chances of winning their first sheriff’s election since 1930 in the November general election.

Hayden’s opponents, including the former top deputy sheriff who is challenging him in the Republican Party primary, argue that he has unnecessarily politicalized the sheriff’s office and hampered its crime-fighting efforts.

Are public doubts about the integrity of local and provincial election campaigns with the rise of like-minded leaders in GOP organizations in Kansas and other states and former President Donald Trump false story that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.

Local Republican leaders investigating allegations of 2020 election fraud say there is little evidence of wrongdoing.

Marisel Walston, the former chair of the county GOP and co-founder of a statewide group for Hispanic Republicans, said she and other local party officials investigated allegations of voter fraud after the 2020 election. While they found some errors and administrative lapses, they found no fraud, she said.

Hayden remains undeterred. Asked at a candidate forum whether he trusted the 2020 election results, he noted that the official count in his uncontested race was more than 260,000 votes, but added, “I don’t know if that’s accurate.”

As in other U.S. suburbs, a pro-Trump background is likely to be a political liability in November in Johnson County, a former GOP stronghold where Democratic voter registration has grown nine times faster than Republican registration since 2016. But Kansas’s GOP voter base is much redder and more pro-Trump.

“We’ve obviously had a lot of moderates who have gone independent or just not voted in the primaries anymore,” said former state Rep. Stephanie Sharp, a moderate Republican. “I don’t think there are enough moderates voting in the primaries anymore to get moderates in the primaries.”

Voters will select major party nominees for Kansas’ four congressional seats, all 40 seats in the Senate and 125 seats in the House of Representatives, and all positions in the state’s 105 districts.

Hayden is a former Army reservist who joined the sheriff’s department in 1981 and rose through the ranks until he won a seat on the county commission in 2008, where he served a four-year term. He won a three-way Republican primary for sheriff in 2016, with no Democrat on the ballot.

He claims that appointing a new sheriff is risky.

“We kept Johnson County safe,” he said at a candidate forum in July. “I stand by my record.”

Hayden confirmed his investigation into voter fraud in 2022, saying he had been receiving tips about problems since last fall. He then attended a conference in the summer of 2022 for a group that a dubious theory that sheriffs have virtually unlimited power in their counties, although he himself says he is not a member.

Last month, Hayden said he had suspended the investigation, blaming the county’s destruction of ballots from 2019, 2020 and 2021 in February, which is at least 17 months late but consistent with state law.

Hayden’s office referred questions about his work as sheriff to his campaign, but the campaign did not respond to a request for an interview.

In his primary, Hayden will face Doug Bedford, a former U.S. Navy Seal and sheriff who served as Hayden’s deputy sheriff from 2017 to 2021 before retiring to become a state liquor control officer.

Bedford said the sheriff has broken with the tradition of his office’s 700 employees being “quiet professionals” who avoid public attention.

“Now it almost seems like that’s the goal, to get into the news,” he said during an interview at the Veterans of Foreign War hall in his hometown of De Soto, on the western edge of Kansas City.

The winner of the Republican primary will face Democrat Bryan Roberson, the police chief in the suburb of Prairie Village, whose office decor features a cartoon portrait of “The Simpons” creator Matt Groening. The former Marine Corps reservist would be Johnson County’s first black sheriff if he wins.

Roberson said he believes Hayden’s investigation into voter fraud reflects negatively on local law enforcement.

“I’m all for investigating crimes,” he said. “But if there’s no information to prove a crime, you can’t keep it open.”

For at least two decades, Johnson County’s violent crime rate — murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault — has been well below state levels, according to data in the annual Kansas Bureau of Investigation reports. Since Hayden took office, the homicide rate has risen from 1 to 2.2 per 100,000 residents. But all 14 murders reported in the county in 2023 occurred in areas outside his jurisdiction.

The county’s population has grown 75 percent over the past 30 years, to more than 620,000. It is also more diverse: previously 94 percent white and non-Hispanic, now 77 percent.

The GOP voter registration gap was once nearly 26 percentage points and is now 8.5 percentage points. In a statewide referendum in August 2022, 69% voted to affirm abortion rights.

“You look at what used to be a powerful, dominant Republican base in Johnson County, and it’s just a loss of voters who are either turning away from the party, switching to the Democratic Party, or just voting Democratic,” said Cole Robinson, executive director of the county’s Democratic Party.

While Trump is expected to win another comfortable victory in Kansas this year, he is likely to lose Johnson County, after losing it by about 8 percentage points in 2020. He was the first Republican presidential candidate to fail there since 1916.

Hayden has said he assumed local elections were running smoothly until Trump showed up in 2020. He said at the recent candidate forum that his office continues to receive tips and complaints about election problems “every day.”

Hayden’s supporters see criticism of his handling of election fraud as an unwarranted campaign to discredit him.

“I believe that election integrity is the absolute root cause of all the ills in our country right now,” said Kay Shirley, a GOP volunteer in Johnson County who supports Hayden. “It caught my attention when I saw that he was willing to stick his head and his neck out, and he just listened and paid attention.”

But even some longtime conservative Republican activists have broken with Hayden after previously supporting him.

Watson, a former chairman of the area Republican Party, said Hayden’s actions and public comments undermined confidence in local elections and discouraged people from voting.

“I was very disappointed in him,” she said. “I was totally surprised that he would lend himself to that kind of thing.”