Trump has also appointed a self-styled conservative election investigator to an election integrity role at the US Department of Homeland Security last week.
Pennsylvania activist Heather Honey, whose faulty findings on voter data were used by Trump to contest the 2020 election, is now serving as the deputy assistant secretary for election integrity in the department’s Office of Strategy, Policy and Plans, an organisational chart on its website shows. The role did not exist under former president Joe Biden.
Honey runs an investigations and auditing consulting firm called Haystack Investigations, according to her LinkedIn profile. Since 2020, she also has led various election research groups whose flawed analyses of election data have fuelled right-wing attacks on voting procedures, including in battleground states Pennsylvania and Arizona.
The claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election were one of the drivers of the insurrection at Capitol Hill on January 6 2021.Credit: Getty Images, digitally tinted
In 2020, her election research misrepresented incomplete state voter data to falsely claim that Pennsylvania had more votes reported than voters. Trump echoed the falsehood during his speech to supporters on January 6, 2021, saying Pennsylvania “had 205,000 more votes than you had voters.” Shortly after, his supporters violently attacked the US Capitol to try to prevent Biden from becoming president.
In 2022, Honey’s organisation Verity Vote issued a report claiming that Pennsylvania had sent some 250,000 “unverified” mail ballots to voters who provided invalid identification or no identification at all. Officials in Pennsylvania said the claim flagrantly misrepresented the way the state classified applications for mail-in and absentee ballots.
In 2021, Honey was involved in the Arizona Senate’s partisan audit of election results in populous Maricopa County. The audit was described by experts as riddled with errors, bias and flawed methodology, yet after six months of searching for evidence of fraud, it still came up with a vote tally that confirmed Biden’s win.
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Former Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer said he received dozens of public records requests related to elections and based on that experience, she was “not a serious auditor”. He said he was surprised to hear she had been elevated to a position of such “authority and responsibility.”
David Becker, executive director of the nonprofit Centre for Election Innovation and Research, said DHS used to have real credibility in its advisory role on elections, but the agency had fired its “real experts” and also done away with much of its work tracking foreign influence campaigns targeting voters.
“What I’m concerned about is that it seems like DHS is being poised to use the vast power and megaphone of the federal government to spread disinformation rather than combat it,” Becker said.
Neither Honey nor DHS responded to requests for comment.
Reuters, AP
