Flanked by Sam Liebert, left, and Scott Thompson, center, Nick Ramos of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign addresses reporters Thursday outside a Wisconsin state office building. The three criticized Republican Senate candidate Eric Hovde for not conceding after vote tallies reported that Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin finished the election with 29,000 more votes than Hovde. (Wisconsin Examiner photo)

Voting rights advocates joined the calls Thursday for Republican Senate candidate Eric Hovde to back away from accusations he made earlier this week that something went wrong with vote-counting in the election Hovde lost to Sen. Tammy Baldwin.

“This is a direct attempt to cast doubt on our free and fair elections. And this is not only disappointing, it’s unnecessary,” said Sam Liebert, Wisconsin state director for All Voting is Local at a news conference Thursday morning. The nonpartisan, nonprofit organization advocates for policies to ensure voting access, particularly for voters of color and other marginalized groups.

“The rhetoric of questioning our democracy is more than just words, but it contributes to chaos and confusion, which undermines public trust in our elections and the officials who administer them,” Liebert said.

The news conference, held outside the state office building that houses the Wisconsin Elections Commission, was organized by the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a nonpartisan voting rights and campaign finance reform advocacy group.

Speakers emphasized Wisconsin’s history of ticket-splitting and the near equal division of Republican and Democratic voters. For that reason, they said, victories last week by Republican Donald Trump in the presidential race and Baldwin, a Democrat, in the Senate race shouldn’t be viewed as remarkable or suspicious.

“Donald Trump won, Tammy Baldwin won, Kamala Harris lost, and Erik Hovde lost,” said Scott Thompson, an attorney with the nonprofit voting rights and democracy law firm Law Forward. “The people of Wisconsin know it, and I think Eric Hovde knows it too.”

“What you’re doing is creating divisions, and that cannot be accepted here in Wisconsin,” said Nick Ramos, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.

During the campaign, Hovde “said all the right things — he talked about how he would honor the election results, talked about … there’s no time for us to continue these types of conspiracies and lies,” Ramos said. But since the election, he added, Hovde has shifted his attitude.

Hovde so far has declined to concede the U.S. Senate election, although The Associated Press called the race for Baldwin, the Democratic two-term incumbent, early Wednesday, Nov. 6. With 99% of the vote counted, Baldwin had a 29,000-vote lead over Hovde, a margin of slightly less than 1%. She declared victory after the AP call.

Hovde’s first public statement came a week after Election Day. In a video posted on social media Tuesday, he said he was waiting for the vote canvass to be completed before he would comment on the outcome.

“Once the final information is available and all options are reviewed, I will announce my decision on how I will proceed,” Hovde said.

Nevertheless, Hovde questioned the vote totals that were reported from Milwaukee’s central count facility, where the city’s absentee ballots are consolidated and tallied.

About 108,000 absentee and provisional ballots were counted in the early hours last Wednesday, with Baldwin garnering 82% of those votes, according to the Milwaukee Election Commission. In Milwaukee ballots cast in-person Tuesday, Baldwin won 75% of the vote.

Both Republican and Democratic analysts have pointed out that Democrats have disproportionately voted absentee over the last several elections and that the outcome Milwaukee reported last week was in line with those trends.

In his video, however, Hovde highlighted the late-counted ballots. He falsely called Baldwin’s lead in that tally “nearly 90%,” claiming that was “statistically improbable” in comparison with the in-person vote count.

Hovde said that because of “inconsistencies” in the data, “Many people have reached out and urged me to contest the election.”

Ramos pointed out Thursday that Wisconsin lawmakers had introduced a bill with bipartisan support that would have allowed election clerks to begin counting absentee ballots the day before Election Day — ending the late-night tally change  from absentee votes that have become a regular feature in Milwaukee.

The legislation passed the Assembly but died in the state Senate. “We have folks in the state Legislature that would rather play political games and would rather see moments like this than actually fix the problem,” Ramos said.

While Hovde spoke skeptically about the vote count in his video, in a talk radio interview after it was posted he described the election outcome as a “loss.”

Hovde is “talking out of both sides of his mouth right now,” Ramos said. “And so, on the one hand, we get to hear him say things like, you know, ‘It’s going to take me a while to get over this loss,’ and then we get to watch a video that gets broadly disseminated across X and Facebook and Instagram, where … he’s literally talking about how he does not believe what happened in Milwaukee and how the numbers shifted [in the ballot counting] aren’t accurate.”

In his video Hovde said that “asking for a recount is a serious decision that requires careful consideration.”

Counties must send their final vote canvass reports to the Wisconsin Elections Commission by Tuesday, Nov. 19. Candidates then have three days to make a recount request.

State law allows candidates to seek a recount if they lose by a margin of less than 1%, but it requires the candidate to pay the cost if the margin is more than 0.25%.

“He certainly can pursue a recount, although it looks like he’s going to have to pay for it himself,” said Thompson. “[But] Eric Hovde does not have the right to baselessly spread false claims and election lies.”

Wisconsin Secretary of State Sarah Godlewski speaks at a press conference defending ballot drop boxes and local election officials on Oct. 30, 2024 in Madison | Wisconsin Examiner photo

As the 2024 campaign air war reaches a furious crescendo over our battleground state, a few groups of public-spirited citizens have been quietly organizing on the ground to shore up the foundations of our democracy.

Take just three events that occurred during the week before Election Day: 

• A bipartisan group of current and former elected officials signed a pledge to respect the results of the election — whatever they may be.
• A separate bipartisan group of Wisconsin political leaders held a press conference to declare their confidence in the security of Wisconsin’s election system and to pledge to fight back against people who cast doubt on the legitimacy of the results — whatever they may be
• Wisconsin Secretary of State Sarah Godlewski and grassroots pro-democracy advocates held an event in downtown Madison to support the use of ballot drop boxes and to defend local election clerks in a season of threats, intimidation and destabilizing conspiracy theories.

All of these public declarations of confidence in the basic voting process we used to take for granted show just how far from normal we’ve drifted.

As Democratic U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan put it in a joint press conference with Republican former U.S. Rep. Reid Ribble, “This is sort of no-brainer stuff.” Yet the two Wisconsin congressmen celebrated the announcement that they got 76 state politicians to sign their pledge to honor the results of the 2024 election.

Notably, however, the list of politicians who agreed to respect what Ribble described as “democracy 101” — that “the American people get to decide who leads them; candidates need to accept the results” — does not include many members of the party of Donald Trump.

Petition signers so far include 64 Democrats, one independent and nine Republicans. Worse, nearly every one of those Republicans has the word “former” next to his or her title. 

Technically state Sen. Rob Cowles is still serving out the remainder of his term. But the legislative session is over and Cowles won’t be back. After announcing his retirement, he made waves this week when he renounced Trump and endorsed Kamala Harris for president. Other GOP officials who pledged to respect the election results include former state Sen. Kathy Bernier, who leads the group Keep Our Republic, which has been fighting election conspiracy theories and trying to rebuild trust in local election clerks, and former state Sen. Luther Olsen, a public school advocate who worked across the aisle back before the current era of intense political polarization.

On the same day Pocan and Ribble made their announcement, a different bipartisan group of Wisconsin leaders, members of the Democracy Defense Project – Wisconsin state board, held a press call to emphasize the protections in place to keep the state’s elections safe and to call out “bad actors” who might try to undermine the results.

Former Democratic Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes and former Republican Attorney General JB Van Hollen joined the call along with former Republican U.S. Rep. Scott Klug and former state Democratic Party Chair Mike Tate.

“I can speak from personal experience, having won and lost very close elections, that the process here in Wisconsin is safe and secure, and that’s exactly why you have this bipartisan group together,” said Barnes, who narrowly lost his challenge to U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson in 2022.

Barnes said false claims undermining confidence in voting and tabulating election results “have been manufactured by sore losers.”

If you lose an election, he added, “you have the option to run again at some point. But what you should not do is question the integrity or try to impugn our election administrators just because the people have said no to you.”

Former AG Van Hollen, a conservative Republican, seconded that emotion. “I’m here to tell you as the former chief law enforcement officer for the state of Wisconsin that our system does work,” he said.

Van Hollen reminded people that he pushed for Wisconsin’s strict voter I.D. law, which Democrats opposed as a voter-suppression measure. “Whether you were for it or against it, the bottom line is that it is in place right now. If people pretended to be somebody else when they came in and voted in the past, they cannot do that any longer,” Van Hollen said.

For voters of every stripe, he added, “Get out and vote. Your vote will count. Our system works and we have to trust in the result of that system.”

Former Republican Congressman Klug underscored that Trump lost Wisconsin in 2020 “and it had nothing to do with election fraud. It just had to do with folks who decided to vote in a different direction.”

He also praised local election workers and volunteers, like those who take his ballot at his Lutheran church, and “who make Wisconsin’s election system one of the best in the country.”

Tate, the former Democratic Party chair, warned that the unusually high volume of early voting and a state law that forbids clerks from counting ballots until polls close on election night will likely mean delays in results coming in. “There are good reasons for that,” he said, “because our good election workers are exercising extreme due diligence.”

In a separate press conference outside City Hall in Madison, members of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign and Secretary of State Godlewski also chimed in to defend Wisconsin’s hard-working election clerks and combat conspiracy theories.

Nick Ramos, the Democracy Campaign’s executive director, connected recent news stories about drop-box arson in other states to the hijacking of a local dropbox by the mayor of Wausau, Wisconsin, who physically removed his town’s ballot drop box and locked it in his office. The mayor was forced to return the box and is now the subject of a criminal investigation. It’s important to hold people accountable who try to interfere with voting, Ramos said, because otherwise “people will try to imitate those types of bad behaviors.”

Besides sticking up for beleaguered election officials, the pro-drop-box press conference featured testimony from Martha Siravo, a founder of Madtown Mommas and Disability Advocates. Siravo, who uses a wheelchair, explained that having a drop box makes it much easier for her to vote. 

Godlewski described conversations with other voters around the state — a busy working mom, an elderly woman who has to ask her kids for rides when she needs to go out, and a young man who works the night shift — all of whom were able to vote by dropping their absentee ballots in a secure drop box, but who might not have made it to the polls during regular voting hours. “These stories are real and that’s why drop boxes matter,” Godlewski said. Restoring drop boxes is part of “helping ensure Wisconsin remains a state where every vote matters.”

That’s the spirit we need going into this fraught election, and for whatever comes after.