Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden on Wednesday said voters “will not stand for it” if President Donald Trump loses the election and refuses to leave office, raising the tension ahead of the November vote.
At a debate with Biden on Tuesday night, Trump would not commit to accepting the election result, reasserting unfounded complaints that an increase in mail-in ballots due to the coronavirus pandemic would lead to widespread voting fraud.
Biden urged Americans to vote for him in large numbers to eliminate any possibility of the Republican Trump staying in the White House if he lost the election.
“The president will step down. The American people will not stand for it. No agency would stand for that happening,” Biden said at a campaign stop in Alliance, Ohio, one of the battleground states in the Nov.3 election.
Trump, who won a four-year term in 2016, was asked at the debate in Cleveland whether he would accept the 2020 result and said:
“If I see tens of thousands of ballots being manipulated, I can’t go along with that,” he said. “This is going to be a fraud like you’ve never seen.”
The president has now said several times that he would not necessarily accept the election result.
Biden has held a modest but steady lead in national voter surveys for months although opinion polls in the battleground states that traditionally decide elections show a closer contest.
