(File Photo: Source for Photo: FILE – Heather Honey, a conservative election researcher, leaves the federal courthouse in Harrisburg, Pa., Oct. 18, 2024. (AP Photo/Mark Scolforo, File)
NEW YORK (AP) — A conservative election researcher whose faulty findings on voter data were cited by President Donald Trump as he tried to overturn his 2020 election loss has been appointed to an election integrity role at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Pennsylvania activist Heather Honey is now serving as the deputy assistant secretary for election integrity in the department’s Office of Strategy, Policy and Plans, an organizational chart on its website shows.
The political appointment, first reported by Democracy Docket, shows how self-styled election investigators who have thrown themselves into election conspiracy theories since 2020 are now being celebrated by a presidential administration that indulges their false claims.
Her new role, which didn’t exist under President Joe Biden, also comes as Trump has used election integrity concerns as a pretext to try to give his administration power over how elections are run in the U.S.
The president has ordered sweeping changes to election processes and vowed to do away with mail ballots and voting machines to promote “honesty” in the 2026 midterms, despite a lack of constitutional authority to do so. Trump’s Department of Justice also has demanded complete state voter lists, raising concerns about voter privacy and questions about how the federal government plans to use the sensitive data.
Neither Honey nor DHS immediately responded to requests for comment on Tuesday.
Honey runs an investigations and auditing consulting firm called Haystack Investigations, according to contact information provided on her LinkedIn profile. Since 2020, she also has led a variety of election research groups whose flawed analyses of election data have fueled right-wing attacks on voting procedures, including in battleground states Pennsylvania and Arizona.
In 2020, her election research misrepresented incomplete state voter data to falsely claim that Pennsylvania had more votes reported than voters. Trump echoed the falsehood during his speech to supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, saying Pennsylvania “had 205,000 more votes than you had voters.” Shortly after, his supporters violently attacked the U.S. Capitol in an effort to prevent Biden from becoming president.
In 2021, Honey was involved in the Arizona Senate’s partisan audit of election results in Maricopa County, she confirmed in a podcast interview with a GOP lawyer. That review in the state’s most populous county, which spent six months searching for evidence of fraud, was described by experts as riddled with errors, bias and flawed methodology. Still, it came up with a vote tally that would not have altered the outcome, finding that Biden actually won by more votes than the official results certified in 2020.
In 2022, Honey’s organization Verity Vote issued a report claiming that Pennsylvania had sent some 250,000 “unverified” mail ballots to voters who provided invalid identification or no identification at all.
Officials in Pennsylvania said the claim flagrantly misrepresented the way the state classified applications for mail-in and absentee ballots. The “not verified” designation did not mean the voter didn’t provide accurate identification information, nor did it mean their ID wasn’t later verified.
Former Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer said he received dozens of public records requests related to elections from Honey during his time in office, which took up “scores of hours of staff time.” He said he was surprised to hear she had been elevated to a position of such “authority and responsibility.”
From what he saw, Richer said, she’s “not a serious auditor.”
Honey’s hiring at the Department of Homeland Security comes amid reports that Trump’s administration has met with several other election conspiracy theorists in recent months. Mike Lindell, the founder of MyPillow and one of the most prominent election conspiracy theorists, said in an email to supporters in June that he had met with the president twice in the previous eight weeks. In June, a federal jury in Colorado found that Lindell had defamed a former worker for a company that makes election equipment by making false claims related to the 2020 election.
Seth Keshel, an election modeler whose work on the 2020 election prompted challenges that were later dismissed, presented his research to White House personnel in May, he said on his Substack account.
David Becker, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research, said DHS used to have real credibility in its advisory role on elections. Its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency had collaborated with states to shore up their elections from foreign attacks and disinformation, he said.
Now, the agency has fired its “real experts” on elections, he said. Trump’s administration also has done away with much of its work tracking foreign influence campaigns targeting voters, both at CISA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
“What I’m concerned about is that it seems like DHS is being poised to use the vast power and megaphone of the federal government to spread disinformation rather than combat it,” Becker said. “It’s going to really harm DHS’s credibility overall.”
