Trump: I’ll Respect Election Results—”If I Win”

The GOP nominee says he is reserving his “right to contest or file a legal challenge in the event of a questionable result.”


The morning after he refused to promise he would accept the results of next month’s election, GOP nominee Donald Trump continued to stoke fears of a “rigged” election during a speech at an Ohio rally.

“I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election—if I win,” he said, drawing cheers from the crowd.

Trump rattled off statistics from a 2012 Pew Charitable Trusts study finding that voter registration systems are “plagued with errors and inefficiencies.” He cited the report as evidence that millions of people are committing voter fraud to help Hillary Clinton. The report does not make that argument, and voting experts say that voter fraud is exceedingly rare.

But Trump also attempted to legitimize his statement at last night’s debate. He told the crowd that his claim that he would “look at [results] at the time” before deciding whether to accept them was akin to Al Gore’s contesting of the vote in Florida in 2000. (It’s not.) “I’m being asked to waive centuries of legal precedent designed to protect the voters” by committing to accept the election outcome, he claimed. He also said he would “respect a clear result, but also I would also reserve my right to contest or file a legal challenge in the event of a questionable result.” What constitutes a questionable result was left unmentioned.

DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

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DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And we need your support like never before, to fight back against the existential threats American democracy faces. Fundraising for nonprofit media is always a challenge, and we need all hands on deck right now. We have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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