The administration of United States President Donald Trump has put in a right-wing researcher who pushed false claims concerning the 2020 election to a place answerable for election oversight.
As of Tuesday, a management chart for the Division of Homeland Safety exhibits Pennsylvania activist Heather Honey serving because the deputy assistant secretary for election integrity within the Workplace of Technique, Coverage and Plans.
Honey’s appointment was first reported by the investigative information outlet Democracy Docket on Monday.
Her place has raised eyebrows amongst critics of the Trump administration as a result of her involvement in a number of efforts that resulted in deceptive analysis concerning the 2020 presidential race.
Trump has pushed the false declare that his loss within the 2020 election was the results of huge fraud, and he has persistently refused to confess defeat.
Since returning to the White Home for a second time period in January, he has positioned loyalists in positions of energy, elevating fears concerning the independence of sure workplaces.
He has additionally used his false claims of fraudulent elections to put stress on the nation’s electoral system, which is run largely by state and native officers.
Critics have warned that overtly partisan appointments to posts overseeing elections might diminish confidence within the voting course of.
“What I’m involved about is that it looks like DHS [Department of Homeland Security] is being poised to make use of the huge energy and megaphone of the federal authorities to unfold disinformation reasonably than fight it,” David Becker, the manager director of the nonprofit Heart for Election Innovation and Analysis, instructed The Related Press information company.
“It’s going to actually hurt DHS’s credibility total.”
Who’s Heather Honey?
Honey’s appointment particularly has prompted election consultants and native officers to talk out, given her outstanding position in spreading misinformation concerning the 2020 election.
As an illustration, Adrian Fontes, Arizona’s secretary of state and a Democrat, instructed the information outlet ProPublica in an announcement that Honey has a “well-documented historical past of spreading election lies”.
Honey leads a consulting agency known as Haystack Investigations, which was concerned in election “audits”, which consultants think about flawed, in addition to one other organisation known as Verity Votes, which additionally purports to conduct election analysis.
Trump and his supporters have drawn on a few of her corporations’ conclusions of their efforts to undermine the 2020 election outcomes.
In the important thing swing state of Pennsylvania, as an illustration, Honey’s group misrepresented incomplete voter information to falsely allege that the state had extra votes than voters in 2020.
Two years later, in 2022, Verity Vote claimed that Pennsylvania despatched mail-in ballots to voters who failed to supply applicable identification.
State officers, nonetheless, accused Verity Vote of misrepresenting the “not verified” designation in its voting system.
In public statements, the Pennsylvania Division of State defined that it makes use of the “not verified” tag to sign to native officers {that a} voter’s identification must be verified. The designation is a “safety function” for voter purposes, it mentioned – not a sign that voters might submit ballots with out correct ID.
Trump narrowly misplaced Pennsylvania within the 2020 election, with Democrat Joe Biden edging him out by lower than 1 p.c.
In Arizona, one other essential battleground swing state that Trump misplaced in 2020, Honey participated in a partisan audit of election leads to Maricopa County, a populous space containing town of Phoenix.
Regardless of looking for fraud for practically six months, the audit turned up no proof that the end result in Biden’s favour was faulty. Nonetheless, consultants say that audit was crammed with errors and biased methodology.
Within the years since, former Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican, instructed The Related Press that he had obtained dozens of public data requests associated to elections from Honey.
Richer served within the position from 2021 to 2025, and mentioned that such requests occupied “scores of hours of workers time”.
He instructed The Related Press he was shocked to listen to Honey was able of such “authority and accountability” and mentioned that she was “not a critical auditor”.
Honey will not be the primary Trump official to face public scrutiny for her position in his administration. Different appointees, like Emil Bove, have confronted intense public questions on whether or not they would prioritise their loyalty to Trump over their dedication to authorities ethics.
Since his victory within the 2024 election, Trump has additionally opened investigations into critics and officers who probed his false claims concerning the 2020 election.
He has mentioned he’ll cast off issues like mail-in ballots and voting machines, calls for shared by others who push anti-election conspiracies on the US proper.
