It was Halloween, the final weekend of the campaign, precious moments for any candidate.
But before courting voters at a trick-or-treat gathering on Saturday in Easton, Conn., Darrell Harris, the Republican challenger for state representative in the 135th House District, said that he was faced with a pressing question from the police.
“The officer asked if I wanted to press charges,” Mr. Harris, 62, said in an interview on Monday.
The police had been investigating the disappearance of his campaign signs a few days earlier from a busy intersection in Easton, in Fairfield County.
Unbeknown to his opponent, Anne Hughes, a Democrat seeking a fifth term, Mr. Harris’s campaign had hidden AirTags inside some of them, according to the Easton Police Department, which said it had tracked a sign stolen on Wednesday to a property owned by Ms Hughes less than two days later.
Mr. Harris, who is also the Republican Town Committee chairman in Easton, said he told investigators that he wanted to proceed with the criminal case. Ms. Hughes, 61, was charged with sixth-degree larceny, a misdemeanor in Connecticut.
In a statement on Monday, Ms. Hughes acknowledged that she had removed the signs and expressed regret while contending that they had been placed in the right of way of a state road, in violation of state law.
“As an elected official, I hold myself to a higher standard, and should never have taken my opponent’s campaign signs,” Ms. Hughes said. “I caused a distraction from the issues and people, the constituents who matter so much to me.”
As with the arrival of the first frost and the palette of peak foliage, the theft of campaign signs has become a rite of autumn across many parts of the country — and an unwelcome occurrence for candidates.
At the same time, the proliferation of signs on traffic islands and by the roadside has for many years been a flashpoint in wealthy Fairfield County, where critics have described the signs as clutter and sought informal guidelines over when and where they can go up.
In response to an inquiry on Monday, a Connecticut Department of Transportation spokesman said that the agency reminded both Connecticut Democrats and Republicans twice during the summer, including at the end of August, that political advertising signs are banned from the public right of way along state roads.
The agency did not answer questions about whether it had received complaints related to any signs in Easton or removed any of them.
Mr. Harris said that some of his signs, which his campaign purchased with taxpayer dollars as a qualifying candidate in Connecticut’s so-called clean elections program, began disappearing in mid-October.
His campaign workers, who are in their 20s, became frustrated.
“So they had the idea,” he said. “Let’s stick an AirTag in a couple of them and see what happens.”
The signs are made of a corrugated plastic that Mr. Harris said can fit an AirTag between the front and back. The devices, which are about the size of a quarter and work with Apple products, are used for tracking.
The stolen campaign signs say, “TAX MY PEOPLE THEY WON’T EVEN NOTICE,” and feature Ms. Hughes’s name. They refer to comments that she made after a news conference in 2025, when cameras that were still rolling picked up her saying: “We’re not rich. But I always say to the governor, tax my people. They won’t even notice.”
In her statement, Ms. Hughes said that “the signs featured an out-of-context quote that succeeded in getting under my skin,” but that she should not have taken matters into her own hands.
She said it was “petty” of her to have done so. She has returned the signs.
Mr. Harris said he was flabbergasted when one of his campaign workers showed him the AirTag ping.
“My first guess would have been a kid or an overzealous random person,” he said, “but I never would have expected it to be Anne Hughes.”
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