I didn’t watch the presidential debate (I typically don’t watch any of them), but someone alerted me to this question that arose, which I report from a transcript:

WALLACE: Alright, so wait a minute. Final question is, in eight states, election workers are prohibited, currently by law in eight states, from even beginning to process ballots, even take them out of the envelopes and flatten them, until Election Day. That means that it's likely, because there's going to be a huge increase in mail-in balloting, that we are not going to know on election night who the winner is. And it could be days, it could be weeks.

TRUMP: Could be months.

WALLACE: -- until we know who the new president is. So I first for you sir. Finally, for the, for the vice president. I hope neither of you will interrupt the other. Will you urge our supporters to stay calm during this extended period, not to engage in any civil unrest? Will you pledge tonight that you will not declare victory until the election has been independently certified?

That phrase “independently certified” is curious. Here are some ways of thinking what it might mean.

Presidential candidates can declare “victory” whenever they’d like, of course. But that can be rather embarrassing if they haven’t actually achieved victory (think “Dewey Defeats Truman” headlines).

So, presidential candidates often wait until the other major party candidate has formally conceded. That can be embarrassing, too—think Al Gore conceding in 2000, followed by George W. Bush declaring victory, only for Al Gore to retract it.

A candidate might wait, then, until a candidate concedes. But that also might require waiting when the facts otherwise indicate a candidate has lost. In 2004, for instance, John Kerry did not concede until the day after the election—apparently, consulting with attorneys about whether a challenge to the results in Ohio was feasible. Of course, Mr. Kerry was within his rights to do so.

Independently, however, news networks had “called” states in patchwork fashion, but in all cases refused to “call” at least 270 electoral votes for Mr. Bush until after Mr. Kerry conceded.

One might, then, say that news networks “certify” the outcome of the election—and networks are “independent” of the candidates. But that seems odd phrasing. Networks don’t really certify anything, they just call it based upon their predictive power. And different networks make different calls at different times. So one might say, “Don’t declare victory until a major news network calls it,” but that seems, well, again, odd.

One could turn to the actual entity that “certifies” elections—the state election authority. That’s not a great answer, either. In most states, formal certification can take well over a month. Even states that have a preliminary certification process take weeks. And, of course, no state certifies a result until all the ballots are in, which, as the moderator noted, could be weeks in some jurisdictions—much less that all the ballots are counted. But, it seems unrealistic, even in 2020, to require candidates to wait until at least 270 electoral votes’ worth of states have certified their results. Even then, legal challenges could remain.

In short, I don’t really understand the phrase “independently certified” here. Really, it means some general sense that some authority outside the campaign identifies the campaign as the winner. But beyond that, I don’t know how helpful it is.