“Georgia sheriffs were seriously handing out those badges like candy in a candy dish,” J.Tom Morgan, a former district attorney in DeKalb County, Ga., who was elected as a Democrat, said in an interview on Saturday. “That badge gives you no law enforcement authority. He doesn’t have the power to write a traffic ticket.”

Mr. Morgan, who is now a professor at Western Carolina University, said the badges became so widely abused that the Georgia Sheriffs’ Association curtailed the practice of giving them out.