Leftist Media Spreads Lies On Trump’s Election Integrity Watchdog

Election systems expert Heather Honey has been sworn in at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as a deputy assistant secretary, leading elections integrity for the Trump Administration, and the left is losing its mind.

Honey, a long-time open-source investigator, has spent years analyzing every aspect of how elections are administered, looking for vulnerabilities that leave election systems open to exploitation. Her investigations have led to lawsuits aimed at changing or clarifying election laws in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, Georgia, Maine, and Tennessee, where she helped rewrite election legislation.

Honey was the lead investigator on President Trump’s criminal defense team supporting his Jan. 6 trial preparation.

Democrat operative Marc Elias, possibly the king of election lawfare, is so threatened by Honey’s new position that he has launched into hyperdrive attacking her on his far-left page, Democracy Docket, where one of his writers, Matt Cohen, has published an inaccurate hit piece smearing Honey.

The piece claims 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.”  Wow. So many errors in just one sentence.

ERIC is a hard left organization that is wildly ineffective at cleaning the voter rolls, (which should be done by state or local election administrators anyway) and that assessment is based on real data, not conspiracy theories.

Cohen also originally claimed Honey used a “right-wing app” called “IV3” to clean voter rolls, and he connected the app to the Election Integrity Network. But IV3 is a True the Vote product and neither Honey nor the Election Integrity Network is affiliated with that group or app, confirmed Cleta Mitchell, an attorney and the founder of the Election Integrity Network. A day after the hit piece was published, at Mitchell’s request, Democracy Docket added a correction for this portion of the still error-riddled piece.

Elias went to social media this week to cast a shadow on Honey’s reputation, calling her an “election conspiracy theorist.” And the word in election circles is that a few more hit pieces are planned from other leftist groups who don’t want anyone to tinker with the election rules that have been quietly established by leftist bureaucrats in Washington over the years. For example, seemingly small decisions about what information belongs on the Federal Post Card Application could have profound effects on elections.

Elias is an attorney who has made a career of attacking Republicans in court. His online bio boasts of winning more than 60 lawsuits against GOP election integrity efforts. Few people understand the nuances of election systems as well as Elias. But Honey does. She will be able to spot and articulate election policies that should be changed to make the elections more secure.  

Before taking the DHS position, Honey has been working as the Executive Director of the Election Research Institute, where she filed the first lawsuit challenging former President Joe Biden’s executive order that required federal agencies to engage in voter registration drives that favored Democrat voters and was funded by taxpayers.  

Honey co-founded Verity Vote, an election research firm; and was a co-founder of the PA Fair Elections Coalition, which has helped educate voters and election administrators on how elections work so they better understand the process. And PA Fair Elections led a 2024 effort to get voters interested in filling Pennsylvania’s many empty elected election official positions. Upon discovering that poll watchers don’t necessarily all understand election rules, PA Fair Elections wrote a detailed booklet called the Elections Officials Handbook. It covers most aspects of voting, such as registration; reconciliation and certification of election results; pre-canvassing absentee and mail-in ballot, provisional voting and more.

PA Fair Elections is a state partner of the Election Integrity Network.

Another of the many errors in Cohen’s Democracy Docket piece claims, “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.”

But Honey’s practice is not to call an election rigged or allege that fraud was committed. Instead, she looks for anomalies and election system weaknesses that could have many explanations, such as an innocent mistake by an election clerk or full-on cheating. Searching for these vulnerabilities and seeking ways to prevent them in the future is an important step in election integrity. Anyone who tries to undermine this sort of work, through hit pieces, social media posts, or lawsuits, is working against secure elections.

Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.