Joe Raedle/AP
Trump says he’ll accept election results…”if I win.” pic.twitter.com/PdeztMX3Zy
— Tom Namako (@TomNamako) October 20, 2016
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.
