A 'constitutional sheriff' tried to seize voting machines in 2020. Officials are bracing for a repeat.
Sheriff Dar Leaf and other "constitutional sheriffs" have become prominent figures in the election denial movement, and among the most dangerous, critics say.
A few months after Election Day 2020, a sheriff’s deputy and a second man walked into the office of the Rutland Charter Township clerk in southwest Michigan. Clad in dress clothes, the man identified himself as a private investigator and said he was conducting a criminal investigation into election fraud.
“It was kind of a shock,” recalled the clerk, Robin Hawthorne. “We didn’t have any discrepancies. We passed the canvass with flying colors, so it was like, ‘What are they doing here?’”
Hawthorne is a Republican in a solid-red township of 4,100 people. She had been Rutland Charter’s clerk since 2001 and had never encountered anything like this.
Rutland Charter Township Clerk Robin Hawthornen her office in 2022.Emily Elconin / Reuters fileHawthorne answered the private investigator’s questions, she said, as the deputy recorded the conversation on his phone. But when they asked to see her vote-counting machines, she was adamant.
You can look at them, she recalled telling the men, but you can’t touch anything.
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