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PHILADELPHIA — Sen. Pat Toomey said Tuesday that it’s “completely unacceptable” for President Donald Trump to pressure state lawmakers to overturn Pennsylvania’s election result, a rare rebuke from a Republican elected official as Trump continues his effort to subvert the will of the voters.

“It’s completely unacceptable and it’s not going to work and the president should give up trying to get legislatures to overturn the results of the elections in their respective states,” Toomey, Pennsylvania’s most prominent elected Republican, said in a telephone interview. His comments came a day after it emerged that Trump called the Republican state House speaker to seek help in undoing the outcome.

Toomey, one of fewer than 30 congressional Republicans to openly acknowledge the election results, said he spoke with President-elect Joe Biden by phone late last week, congratulated him on his victory, and discussed some of the few areas where they might be able to cooperate, such as on international trade.

“We had a very pleasant conversation,” Toomey said.

Toomey slammed Trump’s attempts to change the outcome of an election he lost a day after the Washington Post reported that Trump called the Republican speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, Bryan Cutler, twice to seek help in doing so. Cutler told Trump the state legislature has no power to overturn Pennsylvania’s chosen slate of electors, the Post reported, citing a Cutler spokesman. But Cutler was among several dozen GOP state lawmakers who wrote to Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation urging them to object to the state’s electoral slate when Congress formally accepts the results in early January.

Toomey had previously rejected that idea as well. He said he believes the moves by Trump and some Republicans could damage public faith in elections, pointing out that numerous judges and Trump’s own attorney general, Bill Barr, have found no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

But Toomey also blamed Democrats and liberals for some of their actions.

“It’s also important to point out that this isn’t the only thing that has undermined people’s confidence in our government and our electoral system,” Toomey said. “A lot of Republicans across the commonwealth and across the country are sympathetic to some of the allegations being made by the president because they’ve witnessed the way he’s been treated for the last four years by the left and the press.”

He pointed to calls to impeach Trump before he was sworn in, “an attempt to impeach him over a phone call” and the so-called Steele dossier, a document of unsubstantiated rumors about Trump and Russia compiled by a former British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele. Some of the information was later used to in FBI applications to wiretap a Trump campaign advisor.

“The accumulation of these outrageous attacks leads people to wonder well, what wouldn’t they do?” Toomey said.

(The House impeached Trump for his efforts to leverage his office, and American security interests, to produce political dirt on Biden. Toomey has called Trump’s request to Ukraine’s president in the matter “inappropriate” but said it wasn’t enough to throw out a duly elected president, and the Senate acquitted him.)

Trump on Tuesday continued his baseless allegations, tweeting his thanks to Cutler and “all others in Pennsylvania and elsewhere who fully understand what went on in the 2020 Election. It’s called total corruption!”

There is no evidence of any widespread voter fraud in Pennsylvania’s presidential election. Trump’s campaign itself hasn’t presented any such evidence in its numerous legal challenges contesting the result, nor has it cited in legal filings even a single specific allegation of a vote deliberately cast illegally. Rather, its legal efforts have been aimed at disqualifying votes that all evidence shows were legitimately cast under rules they disagree with. Every major case brought by the campaign has been rejected by judges, including some appointed by Trump.

Toomey, who is not seeking reelection in 2022, noted that the election result is clear and the president’s allegations have not been backed up in court.

“In my view that doesn’t change the obligation of the president’s campaign to acknowledge that they have not been able to demonstrate that there’s been fraud, not on any significant scale,” Toomey said. “That has been determined by election officials, that has been determined by federal judges, that’s been determined by appellate court judges. That’s the opinion of the attorney general who is a Donald Trump appointee. So in my view the outcome of the election is clear and that is that Joe Biden won the election. But I understand why people are upset and why they are inclined to listen to these allegations that have not been substantiated.”

He added, “it’s all very very unhelpful to people’s confidence in our government.”

Pennsylvania officials have certified election results showing Biden won the state by 81,000 votes, nearly double Trump’s margin in 2016.