A Sheriff’s Conspiratorial ‘Election Fraud’ Investigation Is Dividing Kansas’ Largest County

In November, Calvin Hayden spoke to a fringe gathering of “ America First ” conservatives at a church in Kansas City. He told the crowd at Hope Family Fellowship Church that they were in the middle of a war between good and evil, that the Apple logo reminded him of Eve eating forbidden fruit, and that “a lot of the LGBT stuff and questioning the gender” might really be a Communist Chinese plot to “demasculinize our men and our warriors.”

Others on the lineup that day includedFather James Altman, who had called forPope Francis’ death two months prior, and Michael Flynn, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser and pardon recipient, who the following month would tellAlex Jones, “We’re moving towards the sound of the guns here, folks, and the sound of the guns is freedom.”

Hayden was a bit of a luminary himself: He is the sheriff of Johnson County, Kansas, the most populous county in the state, including Olathe and many of the Kansas City suburbs. An elected Republican, Hayden is in charge of a department of nearly 500 deputies, two jails and a crime lab. And for years, he’s pursued a secretive, taxpayer-funded investigation of the 2020 election results in his county, which flipped Johnson County from Trump to Biden.

Hayden is tight-lipped with the media and defensive with other government officials about his probe, but he’s usually happy to tell right-wing audiences about his work, as he did in his November speech, revealing that his office was looking into a tech contractor that Hayden said he’d heard had worked to “flip” large counties’ votes across the country.

“I don’t know that we can win an election anymore!” he said, adding later that he could not say whether “our elections are safe.”

For years, the