Controversial Researcher Accused of Data Tampering Named to Homeland Security Election Integrity Position

NEW YORK – Heather Honey, a conservative election researcher whose incorrect findings on voter data were used by President Donald Trump in his 2020 election challenges, has been appointed to a role focused on election integrity at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Pennsylvanian activist Heather Honey serves as the deputy assistant secretary for election integrity within the department’s Office of Strategy, Policy and Plans, as indicated by an organizational chart on its website.

The appointment, initially reported by Democracy Docket, highlights how individuals involved in election conspiracy theories since 2020 are gaining recognition within a presidential administration supportive of their unfounded claims.

This new position, absent during President Joe Biden’s tenure, arises as Trump uses election integrity concerns to attempt granting his administration significant control over U.S. election operations.

The president has implemented major changes to election procedures and pledged to eliminate mail-in ballots and voting machines in the 2026 midterms to ensure “honesty,” despite lacking constitutional rights to enforce such measures. Furthermore, Trump’s Department of Justice has requested complete state voter lists, raising privacy concerns and questions about the federal government’s intentions with this data.

Neither Honey nor DHS immediately responded to requests for comment on Tuesday.

Honey heads an investigations and auditing consulting firm, Haystack Investigations, as listed on her LinkedIn profile. Since 2020, she has also led several election research groups that produced flawed election data analyses, bolstering right-wing criticisms of voting processes in pivotal states like 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 the state’s largest county, she confirmed in a podcast interview with a GOP lawyer. That review, which spent six months searching for evidence of fraud, was described by experts as riddled with errors, bias and flawed methodology. Even 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.

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.”

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