Heather Honey: Grassroots Election Denier to Federal Investigator

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. Her trajectory represents a pipeline from 2020 election denial directly to the federal office responsible for election security, as internal documents now reveal that she has played a major role in ICE’s investigation of voter rolls and voter registration nonprofits ahead of the 2026 midterms.

Worst moments:

• Supplied the now-debunked claims Trump used to justify his attempts to overturn the 2020 election
• Seized on the momentum of the election denial movement to run a major election denial “research firm” and eventually secure an election security position in the second Trump administration
• Contributed tens of millions of voter records, obtained through undisclosed means, to an ICE investigation into the 2026 midterms

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.

Honey’s activities drew criticism from local election officials across the country, including several Republicans who dismissed her as biased and “not a serious auditor.”

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. By October 2026, news reports described Honey as a senior advisor to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and to the Director of ICE.

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.

Now, 166 pages of ICE internal records, pried out of the agency’s hands through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by advocacy group Democracy Forward, finally shed some light on Honey’s activities inside the department. Honey played a role in a nationwide investigation by ICE's Homeland Security Investigations into alleged voter fraud ahead of the 2026 midterms. HSI took in 50.6 million records from the Justice Department and another 48.4 million voter records connected to Honey, from what the documents call “independent sources of information,” and treated them as part of a strategic push for voter-fraud cases. The documents don't name Honey’s sources, but CNN reports the data may include voter lists from California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Nevada that DHS bought. According to the documents, the agency plans to process state voter rolls with Palantir's ELITE, a tool Palantir describes as built to locate “foreign nationals who meet the criteria for removal.”

The records show that ICE probed hundreds of nonprofits that help people register to vote. In Pennsylvania alone, investigators reviewed at least 82 nonprofits, among them the state chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation's largest Muslim civil rights group. They also looked at Zumiez, a chain store known for teaming up with groups like Voto Latino and Rock the Vote to encourage young people to register at skate events and festivals. In New Jersey, HSI swept at least 41 organizations into its search and found nothing derogatory on a single one.

All the while, 2020 election conspiracy theories remained part of the investigation; one document listed lines of inquiry into counties’ 2020 results and voting machines. Nearly six years after the election Honey helped turn into a conspiracy theory, the operation that leans on her data still has 2020 on its list. Honey has successfully injected the election-related conspiracy theories into official channels, and represents the mechanism by which the election denial movement's claims have become federal posture heading into the midterms.