House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) indicated Sunday that if Republicans retain the House, there is a chance they would vote against certifying the presidential election results.
Jeffries made the remark during an interview on State of the Union with host Jake Tapper, who asked if the New York Democrat felt certain Republicans would certify the results.
“Donald Trump and his allies are already starting to lay the groundwork to contest the election results in November,” Tapper said. “Are you confident that a Republican-led House will certify the 2024 election in January?”
Jeffries responded that voters would not “encounter that question” if Democrats flipped the House.
“I’m confident that we’re going to do everything that we need to do over the next few months to make sure that House Democrats take back the majority so that the American people do not have to encounter that question,” Jeffries said.
He added that “it is a reality that far too many” of his “extreme MAGA Republican colleagues in the House have engaged in election denial conspiracy theories.”
In January 2021, 139 House Republicans voted against certifying the election results in key battleground states, but President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’s victory was eventually certified in the Democrat-led House and GOP-led Senate.
Republicans at the time raised an array of concerns about voting laws, which many states relaxed in 2020 in the name of COVID-19. Some Republicans made claims of voter fraud while others challenged the constitutionality of the election law changes.
House Republican Conference Chairwoman Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), who was at the forefront of the House protests against the results, raised several issues with Pennsylvania’s voting laws, including the constitutionality of counting ballots that arrived in the mail within a certain time period after Election Day. Many Republicans pointed to worries about Pennsylvania eliminating ballot signature matching requirements.
Courts eventually had to grapple with many of the election and voting law challenges. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Pennsylvania’s late-arriving ballots were constitutional, and lower courts across the country addressed dozens of other voting law changes ahead of the election. Additionally, after the election, no legal challenges regarding voter fraud held up in court.
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Stefanik said in January she would vote to certify the 2024 results if the election is “legal and valid.”
Trump said in June during the presidential debate against Biden that he would accept the election results “if it’s a fair and legal and good election.”
