The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that election officials in Lycoming County must hand over 2020 voting records to Heather Honey — an election conspiracy theorist currently serving in a leadership role at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The ruling is a key win for election deniers and anti-voting activists, who frequently seek access to raw election files in order to push false conspiracies about mass voter fraud. And it could allow the Trump administration to make use of the data for a similar purpose.
Honey filed a public records request in 2021, while she was a Pennsylvania-based anti-voting activist, seeking a digital copy of every vote cast in the 2020 election Lycoming County. The county denied Honey’s request, saying state election code did not allow for public citizens to gain access to ballot boxes and voting machine data.
But after Honey appealed the decision, the case eventually reached Pennsylvania’s highest court, which determined that disclosing voting records allows public citizens to “check the math” of local election offices to “ensure the number of reported votes match the number of recorded votes,” according to the ruling.
Honey, who was appointed to DHS last summer as the deputy assistant secretary for elections integrity, has a long history of promoting election conspiracy theories in the Keystone State. She founded Pennsylvania Fair Elections (PFE), an anti-voting group and state partner of the Cleta Mitchell-led Election Integrity Network.
Honey pushed false claims that there were more votes than voters in Pennsylvania in the 2020 election, which were echoed by President Donald Trump at the Save America rally before rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. She also ran an investigative firm that was involved in a widely debunked “audit” of the 2020 vote in Maricopa County, Arizona. The audit, conducted by the defunct cybersecurity firm Cyber Ninjas, motivated the FBI’s recent probe of Maricopa County’s 2020 vote.
Access to raw voting data has led to the spread of false claims about voting, most recently in Riverside County, California, where Sheriff Chad Bianco seized 650,000 ballots from California’s 2025 redistricting election. Unsealed search warrants revealed that Bianco was acting on election fraud claims pushed by an anti-voting group that gained access to raw voting data. Local election officials said that the group misunderstood the data it was looking at.
“Such disclosure promotes fair, honest, and transparent elections, which strikes to the heart of ‘trust but verify,’” wrote Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Christine Donohue (D) in her ruling. “Disclosure facilitates greater trust in our elections, boosts confidence in electoral integrity and protects and promotes the legitimacy of our election outcomes. Simultaneously, disclosure will not violate our voter secrecy law any more than a tally of votes.”
