Sheriff Hayden wasted Johnson County’s time and money chasing Trump’s election lies | Opinion

It’s not a surprise, but still warrants public notice: Johnson County Sheriff Calvin Hayden’s effort to ferret out election fraud in Kansas is officially a huge, wasteful flop.

As The Star’s Katie Bernard reported this week, two years of investigation by Hayden’s office following the 2020 presidential election have produced precisely one recommendation of criminal charges to local prosecutors — and that single count involves an allegation of voter intimidation a few days prior to the Kansas abortion referendum vote in August 2022.

It’s hardly the stuff of widespread voter fraud.

That hasn’t stopped Hayden from suggesting that a conspiracy somehow flipped Johnson County to Joe Biden’s column during the 2020 election. Hayden even took his claims to the 2022 Las Vegas convention of the Constitutional Sheriffs & Peace Officers Association, a group of cranks who argue that county sheriffs’ authority supersedes that of state and federal officials.

That’s a crowd, naturally, sympathetic to Donald Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

“President Trump did not carry our county,” Hayden told the group. “First time since 1914 that Johnson County didn’t vote Republican.”

Hayden added that he was concerned because he actually received more votes during that election than Trump, despite appearing much farther down the ballot than the former president. And his office claimed that it had received more than 200 tips of election malfeasance.

His claims drew national attention.

But Hayden’s objections never made much sense. Johnson County was one of many previously GOP-leaning suburban areas across the country that have been tilting to the left in recent years, with the angle increasing during Trump’s presidency. Yes, Hayden received more votes than Trump despite his less-exalted place on the ballot. Hayden didn’t have an opponent, though. Trump did.

As for the 200 tips about supposed wrongdoing? Journalists dug up public records from Hayden’s office. They found just one reported complaint, which the victim subsequently described as “just an accident.”

No wonder Hayden’s investigation has gotten nowhere.

“This shows the, you know, the complete emptiness and, candidly, the complete waste of time and resources that have been devoted to these so-called investigations,” Mark Johnson, a Kansas City attorney who specializes in election law, told Bernard.

Unfortunately, the Johnson County sheriff is just one more Kansas Republican who has overpromised and under-delivered on claims of election fraud in recent years.

Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach has made a career out of the issue — at both the state and national levels — famously co-chairing Trump’s commission that investigated nonexistent wrongdoing in the 2016 election. (You know: the election Trump actually won.) Naturally, it didn’t find anything and disbanded.

And the Kansas Republican Party’s current chairman is Mike Brown, the 2020 election-denying former Johnson County commissioner and Hayden ally who last year lost his attempt to win the GOP nomination for Kansas secretary of state.

Like those men, Hayden has failed Kansans by raising false and unnecessary doubts — along with Johnson County taxpayer dollars — about the integrity of the state’s elections. Kobach and Brown have been rewarded for their misguided efforts with positions of great political responsibility in the Sunflower State.

Will Hayden similarly benefit from his fruitless crusade? Shouldn’t he pay some sort of professional penalty?

We have previously suggested that the sheriff should resign. He didn’t take our advice. So Johnson County voters may get to decide that question: His current term ends with next year’s election. Democrats didn’t even field a candidate to oppose Hayden in 2020. That was a political misstep, but even more a disservice to the people. The party must get its act together in 2024, for this contest and every other one around the country it has abandoned. You lose every race you don’t run.

Hayden, of course, has not acknowledged his failure. Instead, he has tried to spread the blame — to The Star and District Attorney Steve Howe, among others — while casting himself as a martyr to some greater cause.

“Nobody wants to take the heat,” he told a Kansas legislative committee in March. “I’ll take the heat, I don’t care.”

But there is no greater cause. It’s a good thing that Hayden is willing to take the heat, though. Because he deserves every bit that comes his way.