America, meet your new deputy assistant secretary for election integrity within the Division of Homeland Safety, the improbably named Heather Honey, who brings together with her all the required {qualifications} to work within the Trump administration:
A deep, conspiratorial devotion to believing Donald Trump gained the 2020 election.
That’s it. That’s the one qualification that issues.
The administration invented this job for Honey, as a result of hey, it’s important to reward your loyalists, proper? And Honey is certainly a stalwart. Bear in mind the declare that Pennsylvania had 205,000 extra votes than voters within the 2020 election? That was from Honey’s “research,” and it’s a lie Trump cherished a lot that he used it to hype up his insurrectionist minions on Jan. 6, 2021. Her information was each incomplete and misrepresented, however that hasn’t stopped Honey from happening to have a wealthy life as an election conspiracy theorist for rent.
She helped safety consultancy Cyber Ninjas of their comedy-of-errors election audit in Maricopa County, Arizona, which dragged on for months solely to show that Joe Biden did certainly win. Simply previous 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 declare which was picked up by Trump and blasted throughout Fact Social.
Voters mark their ballots in Milwaukee on April 1.
However in Pennsylvania, the designation of “not verified” within the state’s voter database doesn’t imply “Here are hundreds of thousands of voters whose IDs we have never checked and aren’t gonna.” Fairly, it’s an inner notation {that a} voter’s ID kind was one which wanted additional verification fairly than, say, a driver’s license, which may very well be mechanically cross-checked in opposition to the state’s motorized vehicle information. Sure, Honey’s five-alarm hearth was over a notation that instructed election officers they wanted to make sure 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’s only proper and good that she be rewarded with an administration job, identical to Trump’s many legal protection attorneys.
In fact, the federal government used to spend cash on precise election safety, however the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Safety Company made Trump unhappy by refusing to go together with his election conspiracies, so it was one of many first issues he attacked. In February, election safety officers who labored on misinformation and overseas affect operations had been positioned on go away. And in March, the administration minimize all funding for the Election Infrastructure Data Sharing and Evaluation Heart and sure funding for the Multi-State Data Sharing and Evaluation Heart. There was by no means a query that EI-ISAC was useless within the water when Trump took workplace once more, for the reason that middle was established after issues about Russian interference within the 2016 election.
Now, as a substitute of actual election specialists engaged on actual election safety, we now have one Heather Honey engaged on election “integrity.” For Trump, meaning eliminating mail-in ballots as a result of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin stated so. It might additionally imply eliminating voting machines, and it undoubtedly means attempting to make it tougher for hundreds of thousands of individuals to vote.
To be truthful, it may very well be worse. MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell is operating round saying he usually meets with Trump about their shared delusions concerning elections, however that doesn’t appear to have landed Lindell a job fairly but. Give it time.
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