Leading Election Conspiracy Theorist Appointed to DHS Leadership Position

A leading election conspiracy theorist — described by the anti-voting lawyer Cleta Mitchell as a “wonderful person” —  has been named to a new “election integrity” post at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

According to the leadership chart on DHS’s website, Heather Honey was appointed earlier this month as the deputy assistant secretary for elections integrity in the department’s Office of Strategy, Policy, and Plans. 

The position, which reports to David Harvilicz, DHS’s assistant secretary for cyber, infrastructure, risk, and resilience, appears to be newly created. No such role existed during President Joe Biden’s administration.

DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Honey’s appointment. 

Honey did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Honey is best known as the founder of Pennsylvania Fair Elections (PFE), an anti-voting group and state partner of the Cleta Mitchell-led Election Integrity Network. Mitchell has praised Honey as a “wonderful person.” 

Honey has been involved in efforts to cast doubt on the 2020 election results. She has a long history of starting and promoting election conspiracies throughout Pennsylvania — including one spread by President Donald Trump on Jan. 6, 2021. 

“In Pennsylvania, you had 205,000 more votes than you had voters,” Trump said at the Save America rally before rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol, repeating a false claim that appears to have originated with Honey. 

As the founder of PFE, Honey has led efforts to remove registered voters from the states’ voter rolls — using false and misleading data culled from unverified sources. 

Honey played a key role in the right-wing effort, much of it driven by conspiracy theories, to pressure states to withdraw from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) — a nonpartisan organization that helps to coordinate accurate voter registration data between states across the country. 

Honey used her growing platform in right-wing circles to criticize Pennsylvania’s participation. And she peddled voter registration data from unverified right-wing apps like EIN’s own IV3 to push for voter roll removals. 

Honey also founded the Election Research Institute (ERI), an anti-voting research and advocacy organization that releases reports to support anti-voting policy positions. 

Most recently, ERI was behind a conspiracy theory that Iran hacked Alaska’s elections in 2020 leading to a “significant increase in uniformed and overseas ballots.” The bogus report blatantly misinterpreted a 2020 Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency report that identified Iran as a “threat actor” targeting state election websites. 

In response to ERI’s report, Mitchell reportedly said she pressed Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the president pro tempore of the U.S. Senate, to investigate the false claim. 

“The FBI repeatedly ignored serious threats to our election system in 2020, leaving it significantly vulnerable to manipulation by bad actors, both foreign and domestic,” Mitchell said. “We need to know why that happened and how to keep it from happening ever again.”

This isn’t the first example of DHS working closely with election deniers tied to Mitchell’s network. Democracy Docket reported in June that a department official gave EIN a private briefing on how to use a government database to verify voters’ citizenship.