During his three-year investigation of Johnson County’s election system, former Sheriff Calvin Hayden said he’d received over 200 complaints and hinted darkly at potential violations of election law by county officials.
But a look through the tip sheets shows that — aside from a flurry of worried queries surrounding Election Day 2022 — the majority of the calls and emails the sheriff’s office was receiving were links to articles and podcasts about election conspiracy fears, not first-hand allegations of malfeasance within the Johnson County Election Office.
In response to an open records request by the Post, the sheriff’s office, now headed by Byron Roberson, released “internal case narrative reports” detectives filed each time a tip came in. It revealed a determined effort by a small group of people, sometimes working together, who scoured every aspect of election management for problems.
The Post also contacted former Sheriff Hayden, who had not responded as of the publication of this article.
The first report appears to mark the beginning of Hayden’s investigation. It recounts an initial meeting by Hayden, Undersheriff Daryl Reece and Captain Josh Theiss with two people who had asked for the officials’ time to present information about potential election fraud. The current sheriff’s office redacted the presenters’ names and the names of the reporting detectives.
One of the presenters said she believed state requirements on voting machines were not met during the 2020 presidential election.
“At the time of the meeting, she had no specific information showing fraud had occurred, but requested an investigation be instigated to look into these potential violations based on the information she had collected to date,” the sheriff’s office’s tip report said.
As the meeting ended, the detective said the information would be reviewed and, “for a case to be opened, I told her some articulable information would need to be found indicating a Kansas Statute was possibly violated by employees of JOCO.”
What followed was tip after tip from the same two people quoting, among other things, a Kansas man on the cloud-based messaging app Telegram, an article about Smartmatic (Johnson County uses ES&S machines) links to a video of an audit of Arizona voting, a link to an article about a sheriff’s press conference in Racine, Wisconsin, and other links to right-wing sites and election conspiracy podcasters casting doubt on the validity of the 2020 vote.
There were copies of denied open records requests, copies of ethics codes and conjecture the election results were “made up” which were unsupported by any direct evidence.
Soon, the two people who’d made these reports were joined by another informant, known in the tip sheets as “Reporting Party 7,” who posted suspicions about ballot transfer logs, his belief that there was evidence in the voter registration numbers, ballot chain of custody, oaths of office of officials and certification of voting equipment.
The investigating detective advised him to research specific criminal statutes related to elections.
All in all, there were about 125 tips, not including about 34 that came in on or just after Election Day on Nov. 5, 2022.
Sheriff Byron Roberson, who won the election in 2024, estimated that by the time the elections investigation officially ended on Jan. 30 of this year, some 880 staff hours and $88,000 had been spent on the probe. Roughly $50,000 of that total was spent on computer software.
‘Nothing further at this time’
With the bulk of the tips amounting to observations, suspicions and conjecture, there was little for the investigating detective to do to follow up, other than file copies of the clips and links and sign off with the note, “Nothing further at this time.”
Although Roberson did not work in the sheriff’s office during Hayden’s investigation, he offered some insight into how a typical investigation might work and how Hayden’s could have been handled differently.
In a normal criminal investigation, Roberson said, the tips would come with “who, what, when, where, why and how,” type of information. “But that was not the case, and that’s why there were very few actionable types of complaints,” he said in a recent interview.
Many of the complaints were “frivolous” with not much to go on, he said.
“We generally investigate criminal cases,” Roberson said. “So if there was a criminal case, there would have been further follow-up by the sheriff’s office in regard to that. But if it is a civil or procedural thing, there’s a commission, people that’s their job to investigate those types of things,” he said.
“After a simple phone call to find out, ‘OK, that is an observation and not a crime,’ that would be just informational only and I would pass it on to the (election) commission,” Roberson said. “Here’s the information, do with it what you will. We don’t find anything criminal in nature for us to investigate.”
Law enforcement officers do that often, forwarding reports to family services, mental health and various other county departments they pertain to when there’s nothing criminal for them to act on, he explained.
Reporting Party 7
Shortly after Roberson closed the investigation, he put out a press release saying that only three people were responsible for the majority of the tips.
A count of the reports shows that 50 of the reports were made by the first two people to sit down with sheriff’s officials and pitch for an investigation.
But another person — identified only as Reporting Party 7 — was responsible for 47 reports just on his own.
The names of the tipsters were redacted on the reports, as were the names of the detectives who wrote them up. Roberson said he made that decision so that future witnesses of crimes would feel safe when reporting something they believe was wrong.
“I have to look at the bigger picture,” he said.
The reports were not all written by the same detectives, he said, adding that he didn’t want to subject a detective who was ordered to do their job to further public scrutiny.
With names redacted, there’s no clear proof of who the person is who was responsible for slightly more than one-third of the complaints made before Election Day 2022.
However, there was a clue. One of the reports from Reporting Party 7 said he was planning to be a presenter at a Kansas Senate committee meeting on Feb. 11, 2022.
Six people testified at that committee hearing. Two were women (the sheriff’s office reports refer to Reporting Party 7 as a “he”). One, Douglas Frank, was an Ohio teacher and associate of My Pillow founder Mike Lindell, who had been touring states with his election conspiracy theories and opened by saying he had not been fighting the election battle in Kansas.
The remaining three people who testified that day were Kansas Rep. Randy Garber, formerly representing House District 62 in far northeastern Kansas; Thad Snider, a frequent county election critic and one of the defendants in a lawsuit seeking a revote of the 2020 election; and Rob Strathman, another local election skeptic.
Strathman, when reached by phone, said he was not the person who filed the complaints. Attempts to reach Garber and Snider have so far been unsuccessful.
Election Day anxiety
Before Election Day in 2022, firsthand accounts of questionable incidents were few and far between, but there were some.
In one case, during advance voting in the August 2022 primary, a tipster called out something she’d heard an election worker say at the Johnson County Arts and Heritage Center in Overland Park.
According to the report, she overheard the worker telling someone they could advance vote and then return and vote on August 2, in the same election. That was incorrect for the primary, however, the voter could come back and vote in the general election in November. The report said the worker admitted her mistake.
Another tip sheet account was critical of the supervising judge at a polling place, who did not seem to be well organized.
In another, a tipster claimed to know someone who voted in Kansas but was a resident of Missouri.
There is no paper trail of sheriff’s office follow-ups on those or most other accounts.
Most of the Election Day complaints in November, which were all filed on the same report sheet, involved difficulties with the touch screen voting machines and printouts, and most were resolved on the spot.
Others reflected distrust of the election process and fears about the legality of curbside voting, WiFi connections or whether workers would properly handle paper ballots.
Monitoring drop boxes, testing Wifi
Not everything in the case file was tips. Sheriff’s officers also went out in search of information on their own.
In an early instance in the fall of 2021, a deputy scanned for wireless signals near a voting site in Gardner with his phone. The site and the election PollPad were both password protected, the report said.
On Jan. 6 and 7, 2022, sheriff’s officers were given a tour and an explanation of procedures at the county election office, including a look into how the voting machines were set up.
The legwork also involved surveillance of drop boxes at one point.
Enlisting the help of the sheriff’s investigations, warrants and drug task force units, officers deployed to multiple drop boxes from July 13 through Aug. 2, 2022. The project, “to monitor for potential attempted ballot fraud”, also involved two overnight observations.
The conclusion: “Nothing suspicious was observed and no reports were generated due to this surveillance.”
As the 2022 election approached, Hayden ordered one detective to inquire about data that Los Angeles County law enforcement had in connection with a case against Konnech Inc., a Michigan-based vendor of poll worker management software that had been wrongly accused of improperly storing election data on Chinese servers.
Hayden advised the detective to contact Harry Haury, founder of a cyber security company and a St. Louis native with ties to the “Stop the Steal” movement.
Haury had been working with Los Angeles officials on a now-debunked case against Konnech. According to the report, Haury claimed Johnson County’s election software had been compromised, but he could not give up the data without an OK from the county district attorney’s office.
That never happened, and Los Angeles’s case fell apart, with Konnech winning exoneration and a $5 million court settlement.
Ultimately, Hayden’s investigation into Johnson County elections only yielded one case that was sent on for charging.
That one case was based on a complaint by a Roeland Park poll worker who objected to being prevented from voting on Election Day because she would be prohibited from leaving her post. Her other voting options would have been advance voting or by mail.
The incident was referred for charging under “Intimidation of Voters” KSA 25-2415.A.1.
In that case, District Attorney Steve Howe said there was not a strong enough case to take to court.
The aftermath
Hayden paused the investigation in July of 2024, without officially ending it. The move came amid a heated primary challenge Hayden faced from former Undersheriff Doug Bedford, who questioned Hayden’s election probe. (Bedford would eventually end up defeating Hayden that August and lose to Roberson in November.)
By the time he paused the investigation, Hayden had commented extensively to partisan political groups on nearly every aspect of the county’s election procedures, from changing patterns of party affiliations to ballot custody chains at drop boxes to voting machines to Konnech.
Election officials in Johnson County and Secretary of State Scott Schwab maintained throughout the years of the open probe that the elections were conducted fairly and without fraud or systemic irregularities.
Near the end, Hayden was embroiled in a controversy over preserving the ballots from 2019, 2020 and 2021 and whether he had a valid search warrant signed by a judge to prevent their shredding required by state law. It turns out, he did not.
The tip sheets in the investigation case file reviewed by the Post do not address the ballot preservation issue.
Current Sheriff Roberson said it should have been clear sooner that there wasn’t evidence to continue investigating.
The Konnech question was a “witch hunt” that could have dragged the county into a court loss, Roberson said, and Hayden would have done better to confer with the district attorney’s office about the case involving the election worker before deciding if it should be referred for charges.
“That would save a lot of work and a lot of time. That’s what it’s about: using the resources how they’re supposed to be used and not spending years on trying to develop a case when it’s not there,” he said. “In my opinion, there was nothing criminally chargeable and it should not have taken that long to figure that out.”
Although the investigation began in 2021, the vast majority of tip sheets were from the first nine months of 2022. After November of that year, no more tips from the public were recorded.
Hayden paused the investigation before losing the 2024 August primary. Roberson said there have been no more complaints coming in about election security since then.
“Zero. Not a single inquiry.”
