When Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, the moderator of the third presidential debate on Oct. 19, asked Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump whether he would completely accept the result of this year’s election, Trump replied that he would “look at it at the time” and “keep you in suspense.”

Trump’s answer during the debate may not seem problematic at first, as this election could be a close and potentially contentious one. The season has been rife with scandal on both sides, and approval for both the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates is low. According to Gallup polls, favorability ratings for both Trump and Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton have remained below 45 percent since July, compared to ratings above 50 percent in a similar timeframe for both major candidates in the 2008 and 2012 elections.

However, Trump has also claimed that the election more generally is rigged against him both in the debate and on platforms such as Twitter, where he has tweeted without evidence such claims as that Clinton was provided questions to the third debate in advance, raising concerns about the need for both Trump and his supporters to respect voters’ ultimate decisions regardless of any perceived rigging.

No presidential candidate since 1876 has contested voters’ verdict in the presidential election, even in very close races. In the 1960 election, for example, Richard Nixon accepted his loss by a 0.1-percent margin to John F. Kennedy even though the gap was and remains one of the smallest in U.S. history.

To be sure, vote recounts and scrutiny of election results have come into play in past elections, such as in 2000, when candidate Al Gore requested and the Supreme Court eventually denied by-hand recounts in some potentially election-changing Florida counties with narrow margins between Gore and his opponent George W. Bush.

But unlike Gore’s, the attitude that Trump has repeatedly expressed both in the third debate and elsewhere, of a potential unwillingness to accept the election results even before early results have been returned due to unsubstantiated claims of rigging, is unheard-of.

America remains a democratic country and American elections remain fair because voters’ voices are, in the end, final and supersessional. Trump’s nebulous “keeping us in suspense” about respecting the results of the election both contradicts the fundamental democratic right of all eligible voters to express their opinions by voting no matter what and sets a dangerous precedent for future candidates for public office at every level of government.

Next week, the voters of our country will speak, and everyone, not just Trump, must accept the results—whether they agree with them or not.