PHILADELPHIA — A prominent Pennsylvania election denier who led an unsuccessful effort to cancel the votes of hundreds of Pennsylvanians last year and has long been notorious for spreading inaccurate data in an effort to prove false claims of voter fraud is now a top staffer at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Heather Honey, who co-founded PA Fair Elections, is now the deputy assistant secretary for elections integrity at DHS according to the agency’s website. Her appointment, which raised alarms among election experts, follows a pattern of President Donald Trump amplifying election misinformation and rewarding those who support his false claims about the 2020 election.

Honey is one of Pennsylvania’s most prolific election deniers, devoting time and resources to inaccurate claims of fraud in the 2020 election that were at times repeated by Trump himself.

She describes herself as an investigator, running Lebanon-based Haystack LLC, Verity Vote and the Elections Research Institute, according to her bio on the Pennsylvania Leadership Conference. It’s unclear whether she’ll retain those roles after joining the administration.

Honey and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to questions about the nature of her role at DHS.

Since returning to office Trump has continued to falsely insist he won the 2020 election against former President Joe Biden. Trump vowed to eliminate mail voting, claiming without proof the voting method was corrupt. And the Department of Justice sent letters to more than a dozen states, including Pennsylvania, demanding information about voter roll maintenance and access to the states’ full, unredacted voter registration databases. DHS also cut funding to key election security programs earlier this year,

“All of these things play into an effort that we’re going to see accelerate to potentially interfere with the 2026 elections and delegitimize them if they don’t go the way the president wants them to,” said David Becker, the founder of the non-partisan Center for Election Innovation and Research.

In recent months, Becker said, the DHS has lost trust among state election officials as its dismantled systems and expertise built, largely during Trump’s first term, to ensure election security and information sharing.

“I think it’s highly possible that, given this appointment, and ... the false conspiracy theories she’s raised, that we’ll see DHS become an amplifier for false claims about future elections,” Becker said.

Honey is closely tied to Cleta Mitchell, the senior legal fellow at the Conservative Partnership Institute, who has been a chief source for Republicans to argue for stricter policies to block non-citizens from voting even as such cases are extremely rare and already illegal.

According to Votebeat Pennsylvania, Honey’s research often yields inaccurate figures based on incomplete data that are then amplified by right-wing activists and, at one point, Trump himself. Her research motivated Republican secretaries of state to end participation in the Election Registration Information Center which helps officials keep voter rolls up to date.

In the lead-up to the 2024 election Honey appeared poised to shed doubt on the results if Trump did not win. Her organization urged election officials to remove hundreds of voters from the rolls before Election Day based on unreliable data; later activists said they were working with Honey’s organization when they lodged hundreds of unsuccessful challenges to mail ballots days before the election.

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