America, meet your new deputy assistant secretary for election integrity in the Department of Homeland Security, the improbably named Heather Honey, who brings with her all the necessary qualifications to work in the Trump administration:
A deep, conspiratorial devotion to believing Donald Trump won the 2020 election.
That’s it. That’s the only qualification that matters.
The administration invented this job for Honey, because hey, you have to reward your loyalists, right? And Honey is indeed a stalwart. Remember the claim that Pennsylvania had 205,000 more votes than voters in the 2020 election? That was from Honey’s “research,” and it’s a lie Trump loved so much that he used it to hype up his insurrectionist minions on Jan. 6, 2021. Her data was both incomplete and misrepresented, but that hasn’t stopped Honey from going on to have a rich life as an election conspiracy theorist for hire.
She helped security consultancy Cyber Ninjas in their comedy-of-errors election audit in Maricopa County, Arizona, which dragged on for months only to prove that Joe Biden did indeed win. Just prior to the 2022 midterms, she issued a report saying that a “shocking 249,000 unverified mail ballots have been sent to applicants who provided invalid identification or no identification at all,” a claim which was picked up by Trump and blasted across Truth Social.
But in Pennsylvania, the designation of “not verified” in the state’s voter database doesn’t mean “Here are hundreds of thousands of voters whose IDs we have never checked and aren’t gonna.” Rather, it is an internal notation that a voter’s ID type was one that needed further verification rather than, say, a driver’s license, which could be automatically cross-checked against the state’s motor vehicle data. Yes, Honey’s five-alarm fire was over a notation that told election officials they needed to ensure the identification was verified.
Honey has boasted of being the “lead investigator on President Trump’s criminal defense team supporting his January 6 trial preparation,” so it is only right and good that she be rewarded with an administration job, just like Trump’s many criminal defense attorneys.
Of course, the government used to spend money on actual election security, but the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency made Trump sad by refusing to go along with his election conspiracies, so it was one of the first things he attacked. In February, election security officials who worked on misinformation and foreign influence operations were placed on leave. And in March, the administration cut all funding for the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center and certain funding for the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center. There was never a question that EI-ISAC was dead in the water when Trump took office again, since the center was established after concerns about Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Now, instead of real election experts working on real election security, we have one Heather Honey working on election “integrity.” For Trump, that means eliminating mail-in ballots because Russian dictator Vladimir Putin said so. It may also mean getting rid of voting machines, and it definitely means trying to make it harder for millions of people to vote.
To be fair, it could be worse. MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell is running around saying he regularly meets with Trump about their shared delusions regarding elections, but that doesn’t seem to have landed Lindell a job quite yet. Give it time.
