Stefanik won’t commit to certifying 2024 election results

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) on Sunday stopped short of saying she will certify the 2024 election results, saying she will “see” if this year’s election is “legal and valid.”

Pressed on NBC News’s “Meet the Press” over whether she will vote to certify the 2024 election results no matter what the result is, Stefanik said, “We will see if this is a legal and valid election.”

The question was sparked after Stefanik’s comments earlier in the interview when she discussed why she objected to certifying Pennsylvania’s 2020 election results on Jan. 6, 2021.

“I stood up for election integrity, and I challenged and objected to the certification of the state of Pennsylvania because of the unconstitutional overreach,” Stefanik said. “I absolutely stand by my floor speech. I am proud to support President Trump.”

In Stefanik’s House floor speech on Jan. 6, she argued Pennsylvania’s State Supreme Court and secretary of state “unilaterally and unconstitutionally rewrote election law” by eliminating signature-matching requirements.

She repeated those claims Sunday, telling NBC News moderator Kristen Welker, “Well, I voted not to certify the state of Pennsylvania because, as we saw in Pennsylvania and other states across the country, that there was unconstitutional acts circumventing the state Legislature and unilaterally changing election law.”

Stefanik was among 147 Republicans in Congress who voted to sustain objections to either one or both of Pennsylvania and Arizona election results.

Welker said she didn’t hear Stefanik commit to certifying the election results and asked her, “Will you only commit to certifying the results if former President Trump wins? Does that mean if former President Trump wins?”

“No, it means if they’re constitutional,” Stefanik said. “What we saw in 2020 was unconstitutional circumventing of the Constitution, not going through state legislators when it comes to changing election law.”

“We are seeing Democrats try to steal the election and illegally gerrymander congressional districts that we fairly won and are fair lines. So, I see this at a very local level as well as the unconstitutional overreach we saw at the national level in 2020,” she added.

Stefanik, a steadfast supporter of Trump, also referenced the two rulings from Colorado and Maine that aim to boot the former president from each state’s primary ballot.

“What we’re seeing so far is that Democrats are so desperate, they’re trying to remove President Trump from the ballot. That is a suppression of the American people. And the Supreme Court is taking that case up in February. That should be a 9-0 to allow President Trump to appear on the ballot, because that’s the American people’s decision to make this November,” Stefanik said.

Decisions in Colorado and Maine would remove Trump from their 2024 state primary ballots, ruling he is not eligible for the presidency under the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause. Trump appealed the Colorado Supreme Court decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, which will hear his case next month.

Maine’s decision, from state Secretary of State Shenna Bellows (D), was appealed in state court, though that case could also reach the nation’s highest court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority.

Several lawmakers on the right have argued the ballot decisions are an attempt by Democrats to prevent Trump from taking back the White House in 2024.