Sheriff Hayden has sent Johnson County prosecutors one election case. It isn’t about fraud
After two years of investigating, Johnson County Sheriff Calvin Hayden has sent local prosecutors just one case alleging an election crime.
Hayden, a Republican first elected in 2016, has spent years claiming he’s found evidence of a wide range of violations of election law, and accusing the county prosecutor of being too weak to pursue it. But the single report Hayden’s office has sent to Johnson County District Attorney Steve Howe gives no suggestion of widespread fraud.
Instead, it is a report of voter intimidation that occurred in July 2022, days before polls had even opened in Johnson County for the August primary, which included the state’s referendum on abortion.
The Johnson County Sheriff’s Office sent the report to prosecutors in November. Howe, a Republican, told the Shawnee Mission Post last week that there was no evidence to support filing criminal charges in the case. Howe declined an interview with The Star seeking more information on his decision.
The details of the alleged intimidation are unclear. The sheriff’s office did not answer questions from The Star regarding the circumstances of the case and the front page of the standard offense report provided in response to The Star’s record request included few details.
The report indicates the incident happened at a government building and that the victim of the alleged intimidation was Nicole Atwood, a 37-year-old woman from Roeland Park.
Atwood gained national attention in 2020 for emotional testimony to the Johnson County Commission arguing she was discriminated against for ignoring county mask mandates.
She referenced incidents where people told her to stand back or leave an establishment as discriminatory. She described an incident in which a FedEx employee sought to keep his distance from her “like I’m some sort of diseased leper.”
“We are treated worse than second class citizens. We’re treated like we’re not even human, let alone someone’s fellow American,” Atwood said.
She filed the police report on Aug. 22, the day the statewide recount of the abortion vote concluded. The report was about an event that occurred on July 13, three days before the county opened early voting.
Reached over the phone, Atwood hung up when a Star reporter identified herself and did not respond to voicemails and text messages seeking comment. The witness in the case is Andrea Berezoski, the secretary of the Johnson County Republican Party who did not respond to emails seeking comment.
Mark Johnson, a Kansas City attorney that specializes in election law, said the single case Hayden has sent to Howe proves that there is no election fraud to speak of in Johnson County.
Howe’s move to declare there was no evidence to support the claim, Johnson said, is rare and extraordinary. When declining to prosecute, Johnson said, prosecutors usually couch their statements to say evidence was insufficient rather than nonexistent.
“Hayden has been talking about this for, what, two plus years,” Johnson said. “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.”
Earlier this year, Hayden told Kansas lawmakers that he had identified 15 violations of state election law and that Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab and Johnson County Election Commissioner Fred Sherman were violating the law.
He provided no details of the alleged violations.
But he said that many of those violations don’t involve criminal penalties and implied that Howe was afraid to act.
This story was originally published May 24, 2023 at 5:30 AM.
