Heather Honey:  Deputy Assistant Secretary for Election Integrity

Heather Honey is a Pennsylvania “election researcher” who spent the years after 2020 producing data analyses purporting to show fraud, and who is now Deputy Assistant Secretary for Election Integrity at the Department of Homeland Security. In contrast to other election deniers with influence in the Trump administration, Honey was not a major GOP figure before coming to prominence as an election denial activist. Her trajectory represents a pipeline from 2020 election denial directly to the federal office responsible for helping states secure their elections.

History of election denial

Honey's signature contribution to the election denial movement is the “more votes than voters” claim; through her firm Verity Vote, she asserted after the 2020 election that Pennsylvania “had 205,000 more votes than voters.” Though the claim has been debunked, with election experts finding “a consistent pattern of misusing data to fit predetermined narratives” in the methodology behind Honey’s claims, it has been influential. Trump echoed the more-votes-than-voters figure at a rally just before the Capitol was stormed on January 6, 2021.

Honey founded a group called Pennsylvania Fair Elections, which served as the Pennsylvania state partner of Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network. Mitchell has publicly praised Honey, whose function in the EIN network was larger than a single state chapter. Honey supplied the research backbone behind EIN’s campaign against the Electronic Registration Information Center, the interstate program election officials regard as the best tool for keeping voter rolls accurate. Her research claimed ERIC inflates rolls rather than cleaning them, and helped drive several Republican-led states to withdraw from the cooperative. The Brennan Center notes that independent findings contradicted her, showing ERIC states removed a higher percentage of ineligible voters than non-ERIC states.

Honey has also been involved in election-denial in Arizona, where her investigative firm, Haystack Investigations, was subcontracted by the lead contractor for the Arizona Senate Republicans' partisan “audit” of Maricopa County's 2020 election. She later served as a star witness in Kari Lake's failed case alleging that hundreds of thousands of phony ballots were cast in Maricopa County.

Influence in the current administration

Honey has, since August 2025, been Deputy Assistant Secretary for Election Integrity in DHS's Office of Strategy, Policy, and Plans, a position that did not exist under the Biden administration. In this role, Honey is involved in drafting executive orders and crafting policy, and serves as a liaison to the White House and the National Security Council. DHS, chiefly through CISA, is the federal government's main election-security support agency, and Honey now helps shape that function despite having spent years attacking it.

In October 2025, Honey held a call with election officials from nearly all 50 states in which, rather than briefing them on plans to secure the 2026 midterms, she echoed false claims of widespread 2020 fraud and referenced a report falsely suggesting voting machines were rigged. In March 2025, before her appointment, she reportedly held a call with right-wing activists suggesting the administration could declare a national emergency regarding the 2020 election, and set new rules superseding those decided by state and local governments.

Her presence appears to be degrading the federal-state relationship: Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes called her elevation “a dangerous trend” and warned that giving a platform to bad-faith actors makes DHS harder to trust as an election-security partner, and experts warn states may stop sharing information with the agency as DHS dismantles election-security programs built during Trump's first term.

Honey has successfully injected the election-related conspiracy theories into official channels, and eroded the trust that makes federal election-security support work. She serves as the inside-the-administration counterpart to Mitchell's outside network, and represents the mechanism by which the election denial movement's claims have become federal posture heading into the midterms.