Election officials from nearly all 50 states gathered on a call last month with the Homeland Security Department’s point person on “election integrity,” eager to hear how the woman filling a newly created Trump administration position might help safeguard the vote before next year’s midterms.
But many of them left alarmed.
Rather than offering assurances that the federal government’s election protection programs would continue uninterrupted, the new official, Heather Honey, instead used portions of the meeting to echo rhetoric that has infused the right-wing election activist movement that emerged since President Trump falsely claimed that his 2020 defeat was the result of widespread fraud, according to five people with knowledge of the call.
Honey, a leader in that movement until her appointment in August as deputy assistant secretary for election integrity, complained that her department’s cybersecurity experts tasked with combating misinformation about elections had “strayed from their mission.”
The remark echoed a widespread view on the right that the agency had sought to silence supporters of Trump’s fraud claims. Honey also repeatedly mentioned a report often cited by election conspiracists to support their claims that voting machines were rigged to favor Democrats, according to the people familiar with the call.
The ascent of Honey reflects how Trump and his allies, despite a clear victory last year, remain consumed with the belief that the 2020 election was stolen -- and how the president is using the powers of the government to upend an electoral system that he insists helped Joe Biden take the White House.
In the past few months, Trump has elevated multiple proponents of his fraud claims into high-level administration jobs. Now, as government insiders, these activists could wield their newfound power to discredit future results or rekindle old claims to argue for a federal intrusion into locally administered voting systems.
On a call with right-wing activists in March, before her appointment to the Homeland Security Department, Honey suggested that the new administration could declare a “national emergency” and justify dictating new rules to state and local governments. She said this could be based on an “actual investigation” of the 2020 election if it showed there had been a “manipulation” of the vote.
“And therefore, we have some additional powers that don’t exist right now,” she said in March, according to a recording reviewed by The New York Times from someone who joined the call, “and therefore, we can take these other steps without Congress and we can mandate that states do things and so on.”
She added, “I don’t know if that’s really feasible and if the people around the president would let him test that theory.”
The idea of reinvestigating the 2020 election gained steam recently with the White House’s decision to hire Kurt Olsen, a lawyer who has been tasked with examining the 2020 vote and other election matters, according to a White House official. The hiring of Olsen, who has worked closely for years with pillow entrepreneur Mike Lindell to promote stolen-election theories, was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
Another activist, Marci McCarthy, who spread debunked claims about voting machines in Georgia when she was the chair of the DeKalb County Republican Party, was named in May to be the director of public affairs at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, which is housed at the Homeland Security Department.
McCarthy’s appointment comes as nearly all of the election experts at CISA have been placed on administrative leave or reassigned this year amid a large-scale downsizing of the agency, which had played a leading role in deterring attacks on elections systems and combating disinformation about voting.
The changes are unfolding as Trump takes steps to try to create more structural advantages for Republicans before the 2026 midterms, including pressuring GOP-led states to redraw congressional district lines to maximize the party’s chances of keeping control of the House of Representatives.
Now elections officials who have spent years trying to debunk false claims that the voting systems were tilted against Trump are assessing how to work with some of the most fervent proponents of those claims.
“These people are not coming with an objective frame of mind to say let’s look at the facts and see where that takes us,” said Matt Crane, a former Republican elections official who is the executive director of the Colorado Clerks Association and served until earlier this year as a consultant for CISA. “They have their destination in mind and cherry-pick facts to help stand up their crazy theories, so there’s nothing objective about it.”
Honey and McCarthy did not respond to requests for comment.
In response to questions from the Times, the Homeland Security Department declined to give specifics about the department’s election work. A homeland security spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, said in a statement that CISA’s “mission is ensuring state and local election officials are cognizant of and utilize the most capable and timely threat intelligence, expertise, resources they need to defend against risks, and identify critical infrastructure security needs to maintain electoral functions.” She also said that the agency’s new hires “go through a rigorous vetting process.”
Cleta Mitchell, the Republican lawyer who helped Trump challenge the 2020 results and worked with Honey and McCarthy through the activist group she founded, the Election Integrity Network, praised the homeland security appointments.
“These are the very kind of election integrity leaders every American can be proud to have at DHS,” Mitchell said.
The moves by Trump to elevate election activists could portend escalating legal battles over how much power his administration wields over balloting across the country.
Already this year, courts have affirmed that the president has no legal authority over elections, which have long been the domain of state and local governments. Judges have largely blocked an executive order Trump issued in March requiring, among other changes, documentary proof of citizenship to vote.
But the Trump administration has taken other aggressive steps to assert more sway over elections.
The Justice Department, for instance, is compiling the largest set of national voter roll data it has ever collected, an effort to try to prove unsubstantiated claims that large numbers of immigrants in the country without legal permission have voted illegally.
And in a separate effort that also collects similar details, the Homeland Security Department has been soliciting election officials to upload voter information in bulk through a program it developed that checks immigration status, according to documents released in a recent lawsuit and other documents viewed by the Times. State election officials have long rebuffed attempts by the department to access state voter rolls, warning that sharing this data could expose sensitive information like Social Security numbers, or be used to gain an uneven political advantage.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.