DNC Rapid Response Director Alex Floyd released the following statement: 

“After Donald Trump refused time and time and time again to commit to upholding our democracy and the will of the voters during tonight’s debate, Doug Burgum hopped on the airwaves to do the same. Burgum has already refused to commit to accepting the results of the next election, and tonight he doubled-down on Trump’s reckless election denialism as part of his commitment to Trump’s extreme anti-democracy agenda. Just like the rest of Trump’s VP contenders, Burgum is ready and willing to push Trump’s dangerous attacks on our democracy and sell out our basic values as Americans if it helps him join Trump’s losing ticket in November.”

NEW: Trump VP contender Doug Burgum defended his baseless election denial lies tonight and joined him in refusing to accept this November’s election results.

Savannah Guthrie, NBC: “One of the last things [voters] remember, of course, is January 6, the president losing the election, but claiming he didn’t, people rioting at the Capitol, here he was again tonight asked point blank, ‘If you lose the election, will you concede?’ And he just doesn’t answer the question directly. He’s always hedging it with if it’s free and fair. And of course, the implication is it’s not free and fair, if he’s not the winner, why don’t you just come right out and say, of course, I’ll accept the results of this election?”

Burgum: “Well, I think you heard him say that at the end, it would be easier for him if everybody thought we had secure elections. But we know in our country, being a democracy, this is a challenge.” 

Guthrie: “That’s just a red herring, because I mean, he got to litigate it. He had the advantages of our democracy, and our courts and every other institution, which found that it was a free and fair election, and yet, he’s still on about that. And he won’t say that he’ll accept the results of this election. I just don’t get that.”

[…]

Burgum: “When you’ve got unmonitored documents that don’t have any control over the path of that document, you don’t know where it came from, you don’t know where it’s been, that would never pass any kind of audit from, you know, a quarterly audit from a public company. So I think we all want the same thing in America whether it’s the 2000 election, which was challenged to do down in one county in Florida, the ‘16 election, which people claimed there’s Russian interference, the 2020 election, I mean, three of our last five elections, either the different parties had been saying there was concerns.”

Burgum has refused to commit to accepting the results of the 2024 election, and dodged when asked if Mike Pence did the right thing on January 6, 2021.

NBC News: “Burgum, like other contenders, has declined to comment on whether he would accept the 2024 election results.”

Howard Kurtz, Fox News: “Do you think the 2024 [election] outcome will be contested as well?”

Burgum: *Refuses to answer* “It’s been a stronghold of Democrats to be concerned about election integrity.”

Kaitlan Collins, CNN: “If you were Trump’s vice president on January 6, would you have done what Mike Pence did? Do you think that Mike Pence did the right thing that day?”

Burgum: *refuses to answer*

Forbes: “[Burgum] claimed Sunday Democrats were buying votes in the 2024 election ‘at a scale like we have never seen before’ after Trump accused his opposition party of using welfare to influence voters and cheat in elections.”

Burgum: “In 2016, this network and many other challenged the results of the election…”

Jake Tapper, CNN: “We never challenged the results of the election.”