Heather Honey, a Pennsylvania-based election denial activist with connections to the House GOP, has appeared on the conspiracy theory site The Gateway Pundit to promote unfounded claims about noncitizen voting. Votebeat has described Honey as an "'election integrity' investigator whose research has achieved a remarkable level of national salience among the far right, despite being replete with errors."

The New York Times reports that The Election Research Institute, led by Honey, is representing a group of Pennsylvania Republicans who have sued the state to stop overseas ballots from being counted. 

The suit comes amid a broad right-wing media maelstrom over the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act that’s meant to raise unfounded fears of noncitizen voting and sow doubt in the 2024 election results. Noncitizen voting is already illegal and extremely rare, but this myth has been used to restrict access to the ballot, with disproportionate impact on communities of color and immigrants. Election denial activists have explicitly endorsed racial profiling in their hunt for imaginary noncitizen voters.

Honey is a leader in Pennsylvania’s election denial movement. Per the Times, she leads the state chapter of Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network, a central node in raising the specter of noncitizen voting. Mitchell, a former Trump lawyer who appeared on the call where he implored the state of Georgia to “find” votes and overturn the state’s election results in 2020, is a prolific activist who has been spreading unfounded voter fraud theories for decades.

Honey has a track record of spreading misinformation in concert with fringe conspiracy theorists.

On October 22, Honey gave an interview to The Gateway Pundit in which she said her efforts around Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act  ballots began with “looking at what do the individual states do to verify that somebody is in fact eligible” and claimed that she found that “many states do not even attempt to check” voter eligibility, even falsely claiming that UOCAVA voters’ social security numbers aren’t verified.

In reality, in order to receive a UOCAVA ballot, Americans overseas must fill out specialized forms that require their social security number and other proof of legal residency in the US.

She went on to say she is “concerned” about how “porous” the overseas voting system is and stress that Iranians are “willing to” interfere with the election through overseas ballots. Honey again claimed that the U.S. is failing to protect the election by not checking if overseas voters are even people before emailing a ballot. 

Again, all voters must provide proof of citizenship to vote and there is no evidence of fraud in overseas voting.

The Gateway Pundit is a conspiracy-theory website with a long track record of misinformation. A 2020 Harvard University study identified the site as a source of voter fraud misinformation. 

In particular, articles published to the site in the aftermath of that presidential election falsely alleged that Georgia election workers Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman engaged in ballot fraud at State Farm Arena. On October 12, The Gateway Pundit was forced to backtrack on that claim after settling a lawsuit with Moss and Freeman.

The site’s focus on UOCAVA has been relentless. Site founder Jim Hoft has praised GOP-led UOCAVA lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and North Carolina for following the site’s lead.

The Gateway Pundit has also funneled Russian propaganda into American right-wing media, spread conspiracy theories about the 2018 Parkland school shooting, and pushed birtherism.

According to VoteBeat, Honey jumped into so-called election integrity efforts after the 2020 election. Her research was apparently the source for Trump’s claim at his January 6, 2021, rally that there were more votes in Pennsylvania than voters. The Department of Justice has called this claim false. 

She also wrote a report on the Electronic Registration Information Center, an important interstate voter data-sharing effort that facilitates voter roll maintenance and registration efforts, in collaboration with Mitchell’s coalition that spread “false” claims based on “sweeping generalizations [that] are frequently not backed by the data she presents.” Regardless, Republican-led states began to withdraw from the program..

Honey was also active in Arizona’s sham audit of the 2020 election results. VoteBeat reports that as a paid subcontractor, she “billed tens of thousands of dollars for her work, though it is unclear how much she was eventually paid.”

The Election Research Institute appears to also have connections to rule changes adopted by the Georgia State Election Board that have roiled the state’s election certification process in 2024.

According to ProPublica, a draft proposed rule submitted by Vernetta Nuriddin that would allow the state election board to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” into alleged voter fraud, included a cover letter that read, the “Election Research Institute respectfully submits this petition for adoption.” Honey told ProPublica her organization “did not submit the proposed rule,” then refused to answer further questions.

A recent ruling in Fulton County overturned some of the state election board’s newly adopted rules, but it did not weigh in on the “reasonable inquiry” provision.