The Department of
Homeland Security hired an election conspiracy theorist to work in election
integrity.
Heather Honey, a
right-wing activist who pushed false claims of fraud after the 2020
presidential election, was hired to serve as the deputy assistant secretary on
election integrity at the DHS Office of Strategy, Policy and Plans, according
to Democracy
Docket. The role did not
previously exist under the Biden administration.
Honey is the founder
of the Election Research Institute, a group behind a recent
elections rule change in Georgia which would allow county boards to postpone certifying
election tallies until officials can review any discrepancies between ballots
cast and the total number of people who voted, which are typically considered
to be minor issues that are not evidence of malfeasance.
Honey is also the
founder of Pennsylvania Fair Elections, an election-denying activist group that
spread misinformation about the 2020 presidential election in coordination with
other activists, like Cleta Mitchell. Mitchell, it’s worth noting, is a
far-right activist with the ear of
the president who thinks Honey is a
“wonderful person.”
The Trump administration
has long peddled debunked conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was
stolen, and Honey’s hiring is just the latest sign that they plan to
continue.
After the 2020 general
election, Honey alleged widespread voter fraud in Pennsylvania and attempted to
access voter records to conduct her own independent review. Honey’s research
organization Verity Vote claimed that Pennsylvania had a “voter deficit” which
left more than 100,000 votes uncounted, and claimed that the state had sent
ballots to unregistered voters.
Trump made slightly
different allegations about Pennsylvania’s 2020 general election, claiming that
there had been more
votes than voters,
which also proved to be false.
Honey also served as the
star witness for Kari Lake’s failed
case alleging that hundreds
of thousands of phony ballots were cast in Maricopa County, Arizona. She tried to
accuse the county of failing
to respond to her public records request for paperwork about ballot
drop-off, to which an attorney for the county argued she had completely
misunderstood what kind of document she needed.
When pressed on how many
illegal ballots Honey believed had been injected into the election, she
said that it wasn’t an “answerable question.”
The post MAGA
Election Denier Gets Top Job Monitoring Election Integrity appeared first on New Republic.
