The election software company at the center of Johnson County Sheriff Calvin Hayden’s long-running elections investigation hit back on Monday, warning the sheriff that a baseless investigation results in “serious consequences.”
“I fully recognize that Sheriff Hayden has placed himself and his department in the awkward position of conducting a baseless investigation for the past several years into nonexistent election fraud in Johnson County,” attorney Rick Guinn, representing the company Konnech Inc. and its CEO Eugene Yu, wrote in a Jan. 29 letter to Hayden obtained by The Star.
“Sheriff Hayden should be very careful about making public statements concerning Konnech and Mr. Yu to somehow justify his obvious waste of taxpayer dollars.”
Guinn sent the letter to Hayden less than a week after Los Angeles County agreed to pay $5 million to Yu, who sued over civil rights violations after he was arrested there in 2022 on accusations that he illegally stored poll worker data in China. The case was dropped a few weeks later, with the district attorney citing “potential bias” in the investigation.
The attorney wrote in Monday’s letter that the multi-million settlement “should send a strong message to Sheriff Hayden of the serious consequences that result from a baseless investigation into nonexistent election fraud.”
Through his office’s spokesperson, Hayden declined to comment on Monday.
Hayden, a Republican, faces re-election this year if he chooses to run. He has so far not filed for reelection but his office has indicated he plans to do so. He would face a primary challenge from Doug Bedford, a former undersheriff, in the race that so far has drawn one Democratic candidate, Prairie Village Police Chief Byron Roberson.
Yu, the Chinese-American founder of the Michigan-based company, sued L.A. County and its district attorney’s office in September. His lawyers said in a news release that Yu was subjected to a wrongful, “politically motivated arrest” that was “based solely on utterly false conspiracy theories about Chinese election interference espoused by discredited, far-right extremists.”
Yu’s arrest in Los Angeles fueled right-wing conspiracies of election fraud across the country. And it propelled Hayden’s ongoing elections investigation in Johnson County, which afterward stopped using Konnech in 2022. Johnson County had used the software only to help manage election workers; the program had nothing to do with voting or voting information.