Presidential candidate Joe Biden says US voters "will not stand for it" if President Donald Trump loses the November election and refuses to leave office.
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At a debate with Biden on Tuesday night, Trump would not commit to accepting the election result.
The president reasserted unfounded complaints that an increase in mail-in ballots due to the coronavirus pandemic would lead to widespread voting fraud.
Biden, a Democrat, 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 on Wednesday at a campaign stop in Alliance, Ohio, one of the battleground states in the November 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.
"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."
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.
The Democrat on Wednesday also denounced a right-wing group that Trump mentioned in the debate.
"My message to the Proud Boys and every other white supremacist group is: cease and desist," Biden said.
"The American people will decide who the next president is. Period," he added.
Trump had called on the "Proud Boys" right-wing activists to "stand back and stand by", raising concerns that he was encouraging them to act as freelance poll monitors.
The Proud Boys describes itself as a club of "Western chauvinists" but has been categorised as a hate group by the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center.
White House officials played down Trump's comment about the all-male Proud Boys, which has been involved in counter-protests to demonstrations about race and policing in Portland, Oregon, in recent weeks.
Its members often come armed.
"The president has condemned white supremacy countless times," White House communications director Alyssa Farah told Fox News on Wednesday.
"I don't think that there is anything to clarify. He told them to stand back ... He's leading. He doesn't need any sort of vigilantism."
Australian Associated Press
