A conservative election researcher whose defective findings on voter data were summoned by President Donald Trump when trying to cancel his electoral loss of 2020 has been designated for an electoral integrity role in the United States National Security Department of National Security.
Pennsylvania activist, Heather Honey, now serves as Deputy Secretary of Electoral Integrity in the Department of Strategy, Policies and Plans, shows an organizational list on her website.
The political appointment, first reported by Democracy Docket, shows how self -denominated electoral researchers who have thrown themselves into electoral conspiracy theories since 2020 are being held by a presidential administration that satisfies their false statements.
His new role, which did not exist under President Joe Biden, also occurs when Trump has used electoral integrity concerns as a pretext to try to give his administration the power over how the elections in the United States are executed.
The president ordered radical changes in electoral processes and promised to eliminate mail tickets and voting machines to promote “honesty” in the partial exams of 2026, despite the lack of constitutional authority to do so. The Trump Department of Justice has also demanded lists of complete state voters, raising concerns about the privacy of voters and questions about how the federal government plans to use delicate data.
Neither Honey nor DHS immediately responded to comments requests on Tuesday.
Honey directs a research and audits consulting firm called Haystack Investations, according to the contact information provided in its LinkedIn profile. Since 2020, he has also directed a variety of electoral research groups whose defective analysis of electoral data has fed right -wing attacks in voting procedures, even in battle states, Pennsylvania and Arizona.
In 2020, his electoral research misrepresented the data of incomplete state voters to falsely affirm that Pennsylvania had informed more votes than voters. Trump echoed falsehood during his speech to supporters on January 6, 2021, saying that Pennsylvania “had 205,000 votes more than voters.” Shortly after, their supporters violently attacked the United States Capitol in an effort to prevent Biden from becoming president.
In 2021, Honey participated in the partisan audit of the Arizona Senate of the electoral results in Maricopa County, confirmed in a podcast interview with a republican lawyer. That review in the most populous county of the State, which spent six months seeking fraud evidence, was described by experts such as plagued errors, bias and defective methodology. Even so, it occurred to him a count of votes that would not have altered the result, discovering that Biden really won by more votes than the official results certified in 2020.
In 2022, the Honey Verity Vote organization issued a report that stated that Pennsylvania had sent about 250,000 “not verified” mail tickets to voters who provided non -valid identification or no identification at all.
The Pennsylvania authorities said that the claim flagrantly misrepresented the way in which the State classified requests for tickets by mail and in absence. The “not verified” designation did not mean that the voter did not provide precise identification information, nor did it mean that its identification was not verified later.
The former Maricopa County registrar, Stephen Richer, said he received dozens of requests for public records related to Honey’s elections during his time in office, which he held “dozens of hours of time.” He said he was surprised to hear that she had been raised to a position of such “authority and responsibility.”
From what he saw, Richer said, she “is not a serious auditor.”
The hiring of Honey in the Department of National Security occurs in the midst of reports that the Trump administration has met with several other electoral conspiracy theorists in recent months. Mike Lindell, the founder of Mypillow and one of the theorists of the most prominent electoral conspiracy, told supporters in June that he had met with the president twice in the previous eight weeks. In June, a federal jury in Colorado discovered that Lindell had defamed a former worker for a company that makes electoral teams by making false claims related to the 2020 elections.
Seth Keshel, an election modeler whose work in the 2020 elections caused challenges that were later dismissed, presented his research to White House staff in May, said in his substance account.
David Becker, executive director of the non -profit center for innovation and electoral research, said that DHS used to have real credibility in his advice in the elections. His cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency had collaborated with the states to underpin their foreign attacks and misinformation, he said.
Now, the agency has fired its “true experts” in the elections, he said. The Trump administration has also eliminated much of its work by tracking foreign influence campaigns aimed at voters, both in CISA and in the office of the National Intelligence Director.
“What worries me is that it seems that the DHS is ready to use the vast power and megaphone of the federal government to spread misinformation instead of fighting it,” Becker said. “It will really damage the credibility of DHS in general.”
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