Rep-elect on Trump’s Electoral College challenge: ‘There’s no question in my mind that I think he won’

Rep.-elect Burgess Owens (R-Utah) expressed his support for a challenge to the Electoral College vote that certified President-elect Joe Biden’s win, saying Thursday that there’s “no question” that President Trump won reelection.

Owens, who was endorsed by Trump, told The Salt Lake Tribune in an interview that he “absolutely” believes Trump won the presidential election, despite Biden being widely recognized as the president-elect since November. 

“There’s no question in my mind that I think he won,” he said.

The incoming Utah representative’s comments come as Congress is scheduled to certify the election results on Wednesday, a move that several lawmakers plan to block in a long-shot effort to overturn the election. 

Owens, a former NFL player, compared the fight to his experience in football, saying he plans “to leave everything on the field” for the president. 

“In 10 years in the NFL, I played in a lot of losing games,” he said. “If you leave everything on the field and you’ve done everything you can and there’s nothing left, then it’s a winning game regardless of what the score might be.”

The Utah representative-elect called joining the effort to contest the Electoral College vote “the right thing to do” because “seventy-plus percent of conservatives say” the election “is not fair,” according to the Tribune. 

In his interview, Owens cited a theory that 42,000 votes were counted twice in Nevada, which state officials have denied. He also said after living in Pennsylvania for more than two decades, “I know how the Democratic Party has done things [there], and it has not been fair.”

Owens forecasted that the public will “have a chance [to] hear things some people have never heard before” without specifying what information would be shared.  

“My goal basically is just to make sure that I’m doing everything I can to take this to every legal end we have,” he told the newspaper. “And once the official count is done, then we’ll respect whoever the president is.”

Owens joins more than 30 House representatives and more than 10 incoming representatives who have said they plan to contest the Electoral College vote. The first GOP senator, Sen. Josh Hawley (Mo.), vowed to challenge the vote this week. 

Republicans hope the House and Senate vote to support objections to certain state counts could change the results of the election, but the move seems unlikely to succeed, as Democrats control the House and some Republicans in the Senate have objected to that plan.