Since Trump took office last year, almost all his nominees have something in common – they refuse to publicly disagree with his erroneous claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him. In confirmation hearings, media appearances, and written responses to Congress, many have sidestepped even basic questions about the legitimacy of our elections. For some, this is more than a litmus test, and they are eager to use their new positions to change the way our elections operate.
Now six officials, all of whom have a long history in the election denial movement, have been strategically placed in positions across the White House, Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Department of Homeland Security, and are working diligently to codify their election denial beliefs into law. This is anything but harmless. These are some of the same individuals who laid the groundwork for the January 6 insurrection, where thousands, primed on false narratives about a stolen and illegitimate election, attacked the United States Capitol.
These prominent election deniers are now holding positions with power and institutional authority, allowing them to pursue their fraudulent claims and affect our elections. They can weaponize investigations, pressure state officials, and further erode public trust in the U.S. election system. Their appointments are potentially setting the stage for a chaotic questioning of the 2026 midterm election results.
Kurt Olsen and Clay Parikh
Inside the White House, Trump has brought Kurt Olsen and Clay Parikh on as “special government employees.” Trump gave Olsen the title of “Director of Election Security and Integrity,” a role that did not exist in prior administrations. Parikh’s role has no title that has been made public, but it has been reported that he is working with Olsen on “election integrity” efforts.
Both Olsen and Parikh are long-time election deniers. Olsen was one of Trump’s personal lawyers during his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. The two were so close to Trump that he repeatedly called Olsen on January 6, even as the mob was attacking the Capitol. Olsen was also Republican Kari Lake’s attorney when she challenged her loss in Arizona’s 2022 gubernatorial race, and Parikh appeared as her expert cybersecurity witness. After Lake lost her case, Olsen was sanctioned in federal court for repeatedly making baseless election fraud claims in court.
After testifying in state court hearings, Parikh frequently participated in “Focus On America” events with “My Pillow” entrepreneur Mike Lindell and far-right activist David Clements, both of whom have promoted debunked conspiracy theories about elections. Recently, when asked about his views on election security, Parikh told Talking Points Memo, “Listen: we haven’t had an honest election in decades.”
With these appointments, Trump has seemingly granted Olsen and Parikh the power to refer criminal investigations to the Department of Justice and serve as “experts” in criminal cases. According to the unsealed affidavit that allowed the FBI’s search of a Fulton County, Georgia, election facility and the seizure of its election materials, Olsen was behind the efforts. Parikh was cited in the same Fulton County affidavit. The affidavit said Parikh analyzed “tabulator tape images and related documents” and concluded data from the devices was “manipulated.”
Parikh’s and Olsen’s false claims about elections and prior actions create the potential for the weaponization of federal law enforcement against election officials and jurisdictions that contradict their claims. If their analyses are treated as credible within the federal government, it raises the risk that unsubstantiated theories could be elevated into official actions, creating a pathway for partisan actors to challenge legitimate results, intimidate local election administrators, and erode public trust in the integrity of future elections.
Harmeet Dhillon and Eric Neff
At the Department of Justice, Harmeet Dhillon and Eric Neff are heading up election denial litigation efforts. Dhillon currently serves as assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, which has historically used its power to protect and enforce constitutional and civil rights. Neff, who was hired by the Trump Administration late last year, is currently serving as the “Acting Chief” of the Voting Section of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, a position that reports to Dhillon.
Dhillon was the co-chair of Lawyers for Trump, a group formed in 2020 to “protect the integrity of the election.” During this time, Dhillon appeared on TV frequently to claim that there was rampant voter fraud in Pennsylvania, even going so far as to ask the Supreme Court to intervene ahead of the election. Dhillon’s law group also sued states that attempted to keep Trump off the ballot in the 2024 presidential race because of his actions related to January 6.
Neff has a history of litigating cases based on false claims of election fraud. In 2022, Neff, then serving as a prosecutor for Los Angeles County, brought a criminal case against election software company Konnech, alleging that its CEO improperly stored poll data overseas. The claims were false and based almost entirely on allegations by the election-denial group True the Vote. Konnech and its CEO sued Los Angeles County, which ultimately settled the case for $5 million.
Immediately upon assuming her position in the DOJ, Dhillon issued a memo to all 11 offices under her leadership notifying them that the division’s mission statement had changed to, “The zealous and faithful pursuit of this section’s mission requires the full dedication of this section’s resources, attention and energy to the priorities of the president.” In a separate memo sent to the voting rights division, Dhillon directed the staff to root out voter fraud and prosecute undocumented immigrants who have tried to vote in U.S. elections. Filings from the DOJ indicate that at least some officials have followed through on this directive, wasting expensive prosecutorial resources on investigating rare and relatively low-stakes cases.
In December 2025, Dhillon and Neff filed suit against Fulton County, Georgia, to obtain “all used and void ballots, stubs of all ballots, signature envelopes, and corresponding envelope digital files from the 2020 General Election.” Officials in Fulton County refused to comply and took the battle to court. After months of civil litigation, a criminal search warrant was filed and executed, only eight days after the DOJ had responded to a motion to dismiss the civil lawsuit. Dhillon then posted from her official account on X, seeming to imply that the criminal investigation was a result of their refusal to cooperate with her demands.
The criminal affidavit was based almost entirely on false claims from Kevin Moncla, a prominent election denier and “researcher.” Former U.S. Election Assistance Commission official Ryan Macias testified in court that the affidavit used to obtain the warrant contained witness statements with no basis in reality and was missing key information.
Dhillon and Neff are also the face of the Trump Administration’s lawsuits against multiple states over access to their voter rolls, having sued 30 states and the District of Columbia for failing to comply with their demands. The DOJ has kept the reasoning behind the requests vague, claiming that they want to ensure compliance with federal voter laws. The “federal voter laws” the DOJ is referencing, the National Voting Rights Act (NVRA) and Civil Rights Act of 1960, do give the DOJ some very limited authority to oversee states’ voter roll maintenance procedures. However, a federal judge in California ruled that they do not give the DOJ the power to demand full, unredacted voter rolls or make determinations on voter eligibility.
Based on reporting and court filings, the DOJ is possibly planning on using the data to challenge voter eligibility and bolster their claims of mass voter fraud. If permitted, this would give institutional backing to fraud claims, allowing for the challenge of election results parties disagree with. For the midterms, this could give officials a basis to refuse to seat new members of Congress, triggering protracted legal battles, delaying certification of results, and deepening a cycle in which election outcomes are treated as negotiable rather than final.
Since Pam Bondi’s dismissal as Attorney General, rumors have circulated online that Dhillon is being considered for a promotion to one of the top jobs in the Department of Justice, including Associate Attorney General or Attorney General. This would give Dhillon, who has seemingly done everything that Trump has asked of her, a new degree of power in the DOJ.
David Harvilicz and Heather Honey
Inside DHS, two election deniers are overseeing the program designed to provide both cyber and physical security support to state and local election officials. David Harvilicz currently serves as the assistant secretary for Cyber, Infrastructure, Risk & Resilience Policy, which sets policy and allocates resources that support state efforts to protect and secure the nation’s election infrastructure.
Harvilicz is a co-founder of Tranquility AI, along with James Penrose, a former NSA leader who was subpoenaed by a Georgia grand jury in relation to his role in Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Tranquility AI made a $100,000 donation to Trump’s second inaugural committee, which, Harvilicz said, was “to meet people that were there who might be policymakers who would want to eventually attend some of our events. It was mostly to meet people.” Harvilicz was also trying to convince administration officials to use Tranquility AI in deportation proceedings, claiming that the platform could be used “to both automatically locate aliens and generate ‘deportation packages’ of overwhelming evidence, including criminal records data from any country in any language, to drive plea agreements and expedite deportations.”
Harvilicz is a hard-core election denier himself, having a long history of tweeting about his distrust of electronic voting machines, which many states use in some capacity. On March 10, 2025, Harvilicz posted on X, “Voting machines are critical infrastructure. They are eminently vulnerable to exploitation. (watch Kill Chain on Netflix) DHS needs to ban voting machines for all federal elections. The time is now. The Democrats are saying 2024 was hacked, give em what they want!”
The other official, Heather Honey, currently serves as the deputy assistant secretary for Election Integrity in the DHS Office of Strategy, Policy, and Plans. As reported by ProPublica, this position was seemingly created for Honey, as it was not listed on an archived version of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) website.
Honey is a protégé of Cleta Mitchell, whom GPAHE has written about in the past and who runs the Election Integrity Network (EIN). Honey formerly ran Pennsylvania Fair Elections, the Election Integrity Network’s operation in that state. Through this organization, Honey and others pushed to remove thousands of people from the state’s voter rolls, based on faulty name-matching software, EagleAI. EagleAI is a voter identification project created by known election conspiracy theorist Jason Frazier, who has repeatedly challenged Georgia’s voter rolls. The Brennan Center for Justice described the data sorting criteria EagleAI uses as “at best unreliable and at worst irrelevant.”
Honey has no experience in election administration or security, working as a private investigator prior to her shift to election denial organizations in 2020. In a September 2025 email exchange, Honey was listed on an agenda for an EIN call, where she was set to discuss “her work for election integrity inside DHS.” During a call of state election officials held late last year, Honey used the meeting to echo rhetoric that Trump lost the 2020 as a result of widespread fraud. Normally, calls like these are used to brief state officials on potential physical and cyber threats to election security, something which Honey has reportedly neglected to do during her time in office.
Harvilicz and Honey leading these efforts is especially concerning, as DHS is the primary channel through which many states receive critical information about cyber and physical threats to their election systems. The agency also conducts vulnerability assessments of state infrastructure, meaning it would have the power to shape guidance on election security depending on a state’s leadership or politics. This would also give them further power and authority to claim that a state’s election infrastructure is unreliable or fraudulent if the situation arose.
