State election officials left a call alarmed after Donald Trump’s new “election integrity” appointee echoed MAGA election fraud talking points, according to The New York Times.
Election denier Heather Honey, a Pennsylvania activist now serving as deputy assistant secretary for election integrity in the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Strategy, Policy and Plans, led a call last month with state election officials.
Five people with knowledge of the discussion told The Times that Honey cited a report frequently used by election conspiracists to claim that voting machines were rigged to favor Democrats.
Instead of briefing officials on federal plans to safeguard the 2026 midterms, Honey used the time to question the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) commitment to its mission and raised unsubstantiated claims of censorship within the agency, The Times reported. Her remarks left officials “confused and anxious”, the newspaper’s sources claimed.
Honey’s appointment itself has raised red flags across the election-security community. She previously advanced baseless theories that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. A department chart updated Aug. 18 confirmed her political appointment to the newly created post.
She ran training firm Haystack Group and gained prominence after the 2020 election by promoting false fraud claims that Trump later repeated publicly. On the day of the Capitol riots on Jan. 6, 2021, Trump pushed a false claim that appeared to have come from Honey herself, Democracy Docket reported, “In Pennsylvania, you had 205,000 more votes than you had voters.”
Election officials had hoped Honey would outline federal plans following staffing cuts that removed roughly 25 election-security specialists from CISA. Instead, she said CISA’s discontinued information centers would not return and that states should rely on “fusion centers”—hubs typically used for law-enforcement coordination—for election matters, according to the Times. That proposal raised concerns over whether such centers had the bandwidth or expertise for election work.
Officials and experts have warned that Honey’s appointment would erode public trust in the federal agency.
Adrian Fontes, Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, warned in August that appointing “known bad-faith actors” like Honey represented “a dangerous trend.” “When the agency gives a platform to individuals who have actively worked to erode public trust, it becomes harder to view DHS as a reliable partner in election security,” he said in a statement cited by ProPublica.
The Daily Beast has contacted DHS and Honey for comment.
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