A conservative election researcher whose defective findings on voter knowledge had been cited by President Donald Trump as he tried to overturn his 2020 election loss has been appointed to an election integrity position on the U.S. Division of Homeland Safety.
Pennsylvania activist Heather Honey is now serving because the deputy assistant secretary for election integrity within the division’s Workplace of Technique, Coverage and Plans, an organizational chart on its web site exhibits.
The political appointment, first reported by Democracy Docket, exhibits how self-styled election investigators who’ve thrown themselves into election conspiracy theories since 2020 are actually being celebrated by a presidential administration that indulges their false claims.
Her new position, which did not exist beneath President Joe Biden, additionally comes as Trump has used election integrity issues as a pretext to attempt to give his administration energy over how elections are run within the U.S.
The president has ordered sweeping adjustments to election processes and vowed to cast off mail ballots and voting machines to advertise “honesty” within the 2026 midterms, regardless of a scarcity of constitutional authority to take action. Trump’s Division of Justice additionally has demanded full state voter lists, elevating issues about voter privateness and questions on how the federal authorities plans to make use of the delicate knowledge.
Neither Honey nor DHS instantly responded to requests for touch upon Tuesday.
Honey runs an investigations and auditing consulting agency referred to as Haystack Investigations, in line with contact data supplied on her LinkedIn profile. Since 2020, she additionally has led quite a lot of election analysis teams whose flawed analyses of election knowledge have fueled right-wing assaults on voting procedures, together with in battleground states Pennsylvania and Arizona.
In 2020, her election analysis misrepresented incomplete state voter knowledge to falsely declare that Pennsylvania had extra votes reported than voters. Trump echoed the falsehood throughout his speech to supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, saying Pennsylvania “had 205,000 extra votes than you had voters.” Shortly after, his supporters violently attacked the U.S. Capitol in an effort to forestall Biden from changing into president.
In 2021, Honey was concerned within the Arizona Senate’s partisan audit of election ends in Maricopa County, she confirmed in a podcast interview with a GOP lawyer. That assessment within the state’s most populous county, which spent six months trying to find proof of fraud, was described by specialists as riddled with errors, bias and flawed methodology. Nonetheless, it got here up with a vote tally that may not have altered the result, discovering that Biden really received by extra votes than the official outcomes licensed in 2020.
In 2022, Honey’s group Verity Vote issued a report claiming that Pennsylvania had despatched some 250,000 “unverified” mail ballots to voters who supplied invalid identification or no identification in any respect.
Officers in Pennsylvania stated the declare flagrantly misrepresented the best way the state labeled purposes for mail-in and absentee ballots. The “not verified” designation didn’t imply the voter did not present correct identification data, nor did it imply their ID wasn’t later verified.
Former Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer stated he obtained dozens of public data requests associated to elections from Honey throughout his time in workplace, which took up “scores of hours of employees time.” He stated he was stunned to listen to she had been elevated to a place of such “authority and duty.”
From what he noticed, Richer stated, she’s “not a critical auditor.”
Honey’s hiring on the Division of Homeland Safety comes amid studies that Trump’s administration has met with a number of different election conspiracy theorists in current months. Mike Lindell, the founding father of MyPillow and probably the most distinguished election conspiracy theorists, stated in an e mail to supporters in June that he had met with the president twice within the earlier eight weeks. In June, a federal jury in Colorado discovered that Lindell had defamed a former employee for a corporation that makes election gear by making false claims associated to the 2020 election.
Seth Keshel, an election modeler whose work on the 2020 election prompted challenges that had been later dismissed, offered his analysis to White Home personnel in Might, he stated on his Substack account.
David Becker, government director of the nonprofit Middle for Election Innovation and Analysis, stated DHS used to have actual credibility in its advisory position on elections. Its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Safety Company had collaborated with states to shore up their elections from overseas assaults and disinformation, he stated.
Now, the company has fired its “actual specialists” on elections, he stated. Trump’s administration additionally has accomplished away with a lot of its work monitoring overseas affect campaigns concentrating on voters, each at CISA and the Workplace of the Director of Nationwide Intelligence.
“What I am involved about is that it looks as if DHS is being poised to make use of the huge energy and megaphone of the federal authorities to unfold disinformation quite than fight it,” Becker stated. “It’ll actually hurt DHS’s credibility general.”
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