Conway: Trump won't concede unless election results are certified and verified

Donald Trump won’t concede to Hillary Clinton unless the “results are actually known, certified and verified,” his campaign manager said Thursday.

Trump drew condemnation Wednesday for suggesting in the third and final presidential debate that he may not accept the results of the election, telling moderator Chris Wallace, “I will tell you at the time.”


“He’s saying that until the results are actually known, certified and verified, he’s not going to concede an election. He just doesn’t know what will happen,” Conway said Thursday during an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.

“I imagine if you had asked Al Gore in 2000 if he was going to respect the election results, he would have said yes,” she continued. “He actually called to concede the election to Gov. George W. Bush, called back to retract the concession and, as you know, George, we had six weeks until the Supreme Court of the United States decided who the next president would be.”

Trump has claimed without evidence that the election is rigged against him but went a step further Wednesday when he refused to say he would accept the outcome on Nov. 8, offering to leave the nation “in suspense.” His position was a reversal from the first presidential debate, when he said he would “absolutely support” Clinton if she wins.

“I just think Donald Trump is also putting people on notice that if there are irregularities, if there’s voter fraud, if there’s large-scale malfeasance that's committed, that he's not just going not to want to investigate that but we have to see what happens,” Conway said, notably a day after telling MSNBC she doesn't believe there will be widespread voter fraud in this election. “I think that if you look at his first statement and this one taken together, you see somebody who’s willing to accept the election absent widespread fraud.”

Conway insisted that Trump “respects the principles of democracy.” “It’s just that he can’t say what’s going to happen if the election is very tight, if it’s just a few votes here and there, as was the case in 2000, George, if one state like Florida is less than 600 votes, as was the case then,” she added. “We just don’t know what will happen.”

Polls, however, indicate that Trump is on the verge of a landslide loss.