Eric Hovde speaks in a video posted on X Tuesday in which he questions how ballots were counted in his election loss to Sen. Tammy Baldwin. Hovde has not conceded despite the race having been called for Baldwin early Nov. 6. (Screenshot | Hovde campaign on X)

Breaking a six-day silence after unofficial returns showed him losing to Sen. Tammy Baldwin, whom AP declared the winner of the Wisconsin U.S. Senate race by less than 1 percentage point, Republican Senate candidate Eric Hovde on Tuesday criticized the counting process and said he would wait to decide whether to seek a recount.

In a subsequent talk radio interview, however, Hovde appeared to acknowledge that he had lost the election.

“It’s the most painful loss I’ve ever experienced,” Hovde told Jessica McBride, the guest host on Mark Belling’s show on Milwaukee station WISN 1130. The remark was first reported by the Associated Press.

There has been no evidence of irregularities in the vote count for the Nov. 5 election, which Baldwin won by about 29,000 votes according to unofficial totals reported by Wisconsin’s 72 counties. Counties are currently reviewing the ballots and will submit their official results to the Wisconsin Elections Commission by Nov. 19. The commission completes its certification of the vote by Dec. 1.  

Prior to his talk show appearance Tuesday, Hovde posted a video on X, formerly Twitter, in which he said that he hadn’t spoken about the outcome since election night because “I believe it’s better not to comment until I have the facts.”

Supporters “have reached out and urged me to contest the election,” he said. “While I’m deeply concerned, asking for a recount is a serious decision that requires careful consideration.”

Hovde said differences between the count of registered voters and ballots cast in some Milwaukee wards raised questions, and he also questioned a batch of absentee ballots counted in the early hours Wednesday that heavily favored Baldwin.

Records of registered voters as of Election Day don’t include people who register at the polls, however. In addition, absentee ballots in Milwaukee often get counted later in the process and historically have included a large proportion of  Democratic voters.

Hovde also claimed the state has “almost 8 million registered voters on our voter rolls with only 3.5 million active voters.”

The Wisconsin Elections Commission website includes an explanation of the state’s voter registration database, which is separated into two sections, one for inactive voters and one for active voters.

Only active voters are included in the poll books that go to Wisconsin election clerks and poll workers.

The list of inactive voters, which the commission is required by state law to maintain, includes people who “die, move and register in another state, are convicted of a felony, are adjudicated incompetent to vote, or are made inactive through statutory voter list maintenance processes,” according to the elections commission. The inactive voter list is “a historical public record, and cannot be deleted.”

Democrats, Republicans join in pushing back

Hovde’s comments were met with a barrage of criticism.

“The Milwaukee Election Commission (MEC) unequivocally refutes Eric Hovde’s baseless claims regarding the integrity of our election process,” the commission said in a statement Tuesday, asserting that its operations were transparent and followed established laws and procedures. 

Because Wisconsin does not allow absentee ballots to be processed before Election Day, “large numbers of absentee ballots” are reported late at night. At the same time, according to the statement, with same-day registration, “this historic election saw record-breaking turnout as many newly registered voters exercised their right to support their preferred candidates.”

Criticism also came from Baldwin and Democrats as well as prominent GOP figures, nonpartisan analysts and a bipartisan pro-democracy organization.

“Eric Hovde is spreading lies from the darkest corners of the internet to undercut our free and fair elections,” Baldwin posted on her campaign account on X. “Wisconsin voters made their voices heard. It’s time for Hovde to stop this disgusting attack on our democracy and concede.”

“Mr. Hovde is well within his rights to request a recount and ensure that the vote count is indeed accurate, but questioning the integrity of Wisconsin elections is an avenue that only sows distrust in the system moving forward,” declared the Democracy Defense Project, made up of Republican and Democratic political veterans

The statement was attributed to former Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, a Democrat; former Attorney General JB Van Hollen, a Republican; former U.S. Rep. Scott Klug, a Republican; and former Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chair Mike Tate — the joint leaders of the Democracy Defense Project’s Wisconsin branch.

Joe Handrick, a Republican election analyst, predicted on Election Day a late-breaking boost to Democrats in Milwaukee, and reiterated that in a follow-up post Monday on X.

Bill McCoshen, a GOP lobbyist whose political career dates to the administration of former Gov. Tommy Thompson, said Tuesday morning on X that differences like the one between the number of votes for former President Donald Trump, who carried Wisconsin, and for Hovde are “not uncommon.”  

The gap of just under 54,000 votes between the two is easily explained by people not voting all the way down the ballot and by third-party candidates, of which there were two in the Senate race, McCoshen wrote. “It’s neither complicated, nor a conspiracy.”

Barry Burden, who directs the UW-Madison’s Election Research Center, said Hovde’s decision to not yet concede represents a new but troublesome trend.

“It’s been happening in the United States over the last few years, of candidates not conceding immediately or graciously as often as they did in the past,” Burden told the Wisconsin Examiner. Donald Trump’s refusal to concede his reelection loss in 2020 “provided a model for some candidates.”

Wisconsin law qualifies Hovde to seek a recount since he finished less than one percentage point behind Baldwin. Nonetheless, “the margin seems so large that I can’t imagine a recount reversing the outcome,” Burden said. “There’s probably no election in U.S. history where that has happened — elections need to be very close for a recount to produce anything different.”

An explicit concession “is one of the things that shows us that democracy is working,” according to University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Mike Wagner. “Democracy is for the losing side because they get a chance to try again in the next election, and admitting when you lose is a critical factor required for the maintenance of democracies.”

Wagner is faculty director of the UW-Madison Center for Communication & Civic Renewal. How the ballot counting unfolded Tuesday night and early Wednesday was no surprise, he said, and absentee ballots are counted according to state law.

“It’s sad when a candidate for office raises unfounded questions about the Integrity of an election,” Wagner said.

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.