The majority of Republican voters in the United States think if Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton becomes president, it would be due to illegal voting or vote rigging, a new poll shows. According to the Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Friday, only half of Republicans would accept Clinton as their president and nearly 70 percent of them said a Clinton victory would be because of vote rigging.

On the contrary, 70 percent of Democratic voters said they would accept a victory by Republican nominee Donald Trump and less than 50 percent would attribute it to illegal voting or vote rigging, the poll showed. The poll shows a broad concern across the political spectrum about voter suppression, the actual vote count and ineligible voters casting ballots.

However, the Republicans feel that concern more. Eight out of ten Republicans are concerned about the accuracy of the final vote count, while about six out of ten Democrats are concerned about the vote count. Sixty percent of respondents, regardless of political party, said they are worried about issues such as voter intimidation and suppression.

The level of concern and mistrust in the system, especially among Republicans, is unprecedented, said Lonna Atkeson, a professor at the University of New Mexico and head of the Center for the Study of Voting, Elections, and Democracy. “I’ve never seen an election like this. Not in my lifetime. Certainly not in modern history.” The difference, she said, is Trump. “It has to be the candidate effect.”

The findings come after repeated statements by Trump that the media and the political establishment have rigged the election against him and he may not accept the election outcome if Clinton wins.

Trump’s claim that the presidential election is being rigged and his suggestion that he may not accept the result of the election if he loses has challenged a centerpiece of US democracy and outraged many Democrats and Republicans.

During a campaign rally on Friday in Cleveland, Ohio, Clinton called the New York businessman’s refusal unprecedented. “Now make no mistake: by doing that, he is threatening our democracy.”

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During the final US presidential debate with Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton on Wednesday night, Republican nominee Donald Trump declared that he might not accept the results of the November 8 presidential election if there is evidence it was rigged.

Press TV has asked two political analysts whether they thought the upcoming election in the US would be rigged as Trump has predicted. Richard Becker, with the ANSWER Coalition from San Francisco, said the election system in the United States is not based on who wins the popular vote. “It’s who wins the election in enough states to win the electoral votes of that state and the electoral votes are very unbalanced,” he said on Thursday night.

Becker agreed that the US elections are usually rigged, but thought that would happen in Trump’s favour this time around.  “The elections are rigged but in his (Trump’s) favor, in favor of the billionaires and the millionaires” or “those who could garner the support of billionaires and millionaires,” he said.

He also touched on the Republican nominee’s allegations about a biased media coverage of the election campaign in the United States. “The mass media is supporting Clinton to a large degree now but it’s been estimated that at least two billion maybe as much as three billion dollars in free media coverage came Trump’s way,” Becker said.

Brent Budowsky, a columnist at the top US political website The Hill, said he supports a direct election of the president by voters, and not the Electoral College. Budowsky, however, ruled out the claim that the 2016 presidential race would be rigged, saying Trump was resorting to “conspiracy theory” to justify his defeat in the upcoming election.

US Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton holds a 9-point lead over her Republican rival Donald Trump nationally, a new poll shows. The former secretary of state has the support of 47 percent of likely voters, while the billionaire businessman has 38 percent support, found the Bloomberg Politics poll, released on Wednesday. Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson has 8 percent support among likely voters, while Green Party nominee Jill Stein has 3 percent support. Clinton keeps her 9-point lead over Trump, 50 to 41 percent, in a head-to-head matchup.

She has a 4-point lead over Trump among likely voters without a college degree, 48 to 44 percent, while the billionaire trails by 13 points among whites with a college degree. The poll was conducted from October 14 to 17 among 1,006 likely voters. It has a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points. Clinton and Trump were literally tied in the Bloomberg poll in September, with 46 percent apiece in a two-way race.

Trump appears to be in freefall after the release of a 2005 audiotape earlier this month of his lewd comments about touching and kissing women without their consent. “Donald Trump’s chances of winning this election have faded,” said Democratic pollster Fred Yang of Hart Research Associates, which conducted this survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff and his firm Public Opinion Strategies.

Trump rejects polls

However, Trump has rejected such claims and polls as fabricated by media outlets and organizations which want to elect Clinton as president at any cost.

Over the last week, Trump has intensified his criticism of the American electoral system. He called the election process rigged, and said the media is colluding with Clinton in order to beat him.

He has questioned the legitimacy of the US elections, saying that he believed the vote was already being “rigged” at many polling places.

Trump has stated that the November presidential election will determine whether America is a free nation, “or whether we have only the illusion of democracy, but are in fact controlled by a small handful of global special interests rigging the system.”

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