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.

Voters at the Wilmar Neighborhood Center on Madison's East side cast their ballots. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

On the ballot in Wisconsin this fall, voters will decide on a referendum asking to change one word in the state constitution to prevent non-U.S. citizens from voting in any local, state or federal elections. The effort is the Republican Legislature’s fifth attempt to amend the state constitution this year. 

Republicans point to a handful of municipalities across the country that have allowed non-citizens to vote in municipal elections like school board races and say the amendment would prevent any Wisconsin communities from doing the same. 

“Addressing this issue now will ensure votes are not diluted in the future,” Sen. Julian Bradley (R-Franklin) told Votebeat. “It’s best for the government to address this concern before it becomes a problem.”

Democrats and voting rights advocates say that non-citizen voting isn’t a real problem and that Republicans have shown no proof it is but continue to complain about it as part of their general anti-immigration push in this election. Plus, they say making changes like this by trying to amend the constitution makes an end run around the normal legislative process and Gov. Tony Evers’ potential veto, while making the state vulnerable to future efforts to make it harder for legal voters to cast a ballot. 

“First and foremost, we have a system that works, and I think this is a solution in search for problems,” T.R. Edwards, staff attorney at the voting rights focused Law Forward, says. “Secondarily, it shifts the burden to the voter. … But then third, I think it’s yet another vestige of our gerrymandered Legislature and an escape to actually go through the legislative process to do things that have an actual debate about what works for our state.” 

Currently the state Constitution says that “every United States citizen age 18 or older” can vote. If approved, the “every” would be changed to “only.” 

“Shall section 1 of article III of the constitution, which deals with suffrage, be amended to provide that only a United States citizen age 18 or older who resides in an election district may vote in an election for national, state, or local office or at a statewide or local referendum?” the referendum asks. 

Opponents to the referendum say it could lead to discrimination against Hispanic voters, who could be harassed and forced to prove that they belong in their communities. They also worry that changing the constitution could lead to future legislative attempts to require anyone registering to vote to prove they’re a citizen, which they say could disenfranchise legal voters who don’t have access to documents such as a birth certificate.

Edwards points to a recent Brennan Center study that found more than 21 million people across the country, 9% of voting age Americans, don’t have access to documents that would prove their citizenship. 

“That number of people, including people like my grandmother when she first moved to the state, [would lose] one of our few things that I think makes us unique as a state, our ability to have same day registration, and we’ll put that in jeopardy,” Edwards says. 

Recently, Republicans have moved across the country to warn about large-scale non-citizen voting in ways that would swing elections. Similar to other Republican claims about the election system, there is no proof that is happening. Studies of the voting system across dozens of communities involving millions of votes have found just a handful of cases of non-citizens casting ballots. 

Earlier this year, Congress was unable to pass a federal budget over disagreements about a bill that would require citizens to prove their citizenship to register to vote. 

State and local officials already have systems in place that determine if someone registering to vote is a citizen. In Wisconsin, people registering to vote must affirm they’re U.S. citizens. Lying about this when filling out the voter registration form is a felony that includes the penalty of deportation. 

“We have so many checks and balances in this state, the people that are non-citizens, you think they would actually risk — like if they’re DACA recipients — do you think they would risk their status and get thrown in jail or even be deported just to go cast a ballot?” Nick Ramos, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, says. “Like, think about how absurd that is.” 

A 2017 report from the Brennan Center for Justice analyzed votes cast in 42 jurisdictions accounting for 23.5 million votes. That report found that in the 2016 presidential election, after which President Donald Trump first raised claims of massive numbers of illegal votes, 30 incidents of non-citizens voting were referred to prosecutors — accounting for 0.0001% of the 2016 votes. 

The Republican attempts to amend the constitution this year have had mixed results. This spring, two proposed amendments to limit who can work on and provide funding for election administration in the state were approved. But in the August election — after Democrats and advocacy groups in the state waged a public-education campaign  to oppose two more amendments — voters denied an attempt to remove powers from the governor allowing him to spend federal emergency dollars.

Nick Ramos of Wisconsin Democracy Campaign speaks at a press conference in Madison Thursday about the Wausau mayor removing his city's ballot drop box | Photo by Ruth Conniff

The mayor of Wausau, Wisconsin, made a national media splash this week when he dressed up in a hard hat and carted away his community’s only absentee ballot drop box, outraging local voters, city officials and voting rights advocates statewide.

“Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would see a sitting mayor dressed up like Bob the Builder physically take a ballot drop box … and illegally place it in his office,” said Nick Ramos of Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. 

Ramos spoke at a press conference outside the Madison City County Building Thursday, standing beside a poster-sized photo of Wausau Mayor Doug Diny caught in the act.

“We cannot continue to allow bad actors to think this type of behavior is acceptable,” Ramos declared, calling for a thorough investigation of the mayor’s action.

Drop boxes were uncontroversial for many years in communities across Wisconsin. But after their use increased during the pandemic election of 2020, conspiracy theorists connected them to false claims of “massive voter fraud” and blamed their use for former President Donald Trump’s loss. A Republican-friendly majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court banned drop boxes in 2022. In July, the new liberal court majority reversed that decision. 

So now drop boxes are back and so are the election conspiracies swirling around them, along with grandstanding by Republican politicians like Diny, who turned his caper stealing the Wausau drop box into a photo op. 

Diny admitted Tuesday to the Wausau Pilot & Review, which broke the story, that he’d taken the drop box last Sunday and locked it in his office, and snapped a few photos to memorialize the act. The mayor had argued with the city clerk about setting up the drop box in the first place, the paper reported — something the clerk was specifically empowered to do by the state Supreme Court decision and subsequent guidance from the Wisconsin Elections Commission. 

Diny defended his unilateral move to override her authority and take the box, telling the paper, “I was hired to tighten things up at city hall. This action is consistent with my overall position and what I heard from residents when I was knocking on doors.”

But in a later radio interview, the Wausau paper reported, Diny backpedaled and claimed he was only trying to protect the drop box, which had not yet been bolted to the ground or unlocked for use, since he was afraid someone would “take it and throw it in the river.”

Diny may already be regretting his caper, which is now the subject of a criminal probe by the Marathon County district attorney. As City Council President Lisa Rasmussen told the Wausau Pilot & Review, “I have huge concerns about this behavior, as there is no place for elected officials to manage, alter or tamper with drop boxes, whether they agree with their use or not.” 

How worried should Wisconsinites be about efforts like Diny’s to undermine voting rights and the smooth operation of elections?

In a Thursday afternoon press call, former U.S. ambassador and national democracy expert Norm Eisen denounced the stunt by the Wausau mayor and “terrible, frivolous challenges” to the regular administration of elections, including the “complete, utter nonsense charge that noncitizens are voting.” 

The point of all these political attacks on voting is “to create the false impression that elections are unreliable” and to help set up a challenge by Trump if the 2024 election results don’t go his way.

The good news, Eisen said, is that it didn’t work last time and it won’t work this time, either. “They will not get away with it,” he declared. Other panelists on the press call agreed.

“We have secure, safe, well-managed, fair elections in Wisconsin,” said Jeff Mandell, general counsel of Law Forward, which brought a lawsuit against Wisconsin’s fake electors, forcing them to admit they tried to overturn the legitimate results of the last election and to agree not to serve as Trump electors this year.

Because of all that happened in 2020, Mandell said, Wisconsin is better prepared to prevent election interference this year. 

Both Eisen and Mandell celebrated accountability for key figures involved in trying to overturn election results in 2020, including Trump attorney Rudolph Giuliani, who was finally disbarred in Washington, D.C. on Thursday. 

Mandell ran down a list of reasons Wisconsinites should feel encouraged about the strength of democracy in our state, including the replacement of gerrymandered voting districts with new, fair maps, the reinstatement of drop boxes, and the defeat of voter purges and efforts to disqualify absentee voters for technicalities.

Sure, there is a lot of political grandstanding by MAGA Republicans, Mandell said, “but none of these things are doing real damage.”

Even the former top elections official in Milwaukee, Claire Woodall — who endured death threats when she was at the center of the MAGA storm while administering the 2020 election — sounded sanguine when I talked to her on the phone about the Wausau ballot box imbroglio.

“I think that the security of our elections and the integrity of our elections has always been in a good spot in Wisconsin,” Woodall said.

When Woodall suddenly left her job this year, apparently after being pushed out by Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson, she joined an exodus of election officials in Wisconsin that has created an unprecedented number of clerks administering the 2024 election who’ve never handled a presidential race before.

But that doesn’t worry Woodall (who said she can’t comment on her own departure).

For years, Wisconsin has been known “as a nationwide example of how to run elections in a nonpartisan manner and not let politics dictate practice,” she said. “And so I think while you have new clerks, there’s always been new clerks. It’s always been a high turnover job. So that fact doesn’t really bother me.”

What does bother Woodall is the political pressure on nonpartisan clerks from partisan elected officials like the mayor in Wausau. 

“It’s just unfortunate that they’re putting clerks in that position,” she said. “Clerks are not well paid by any means,” and yet “they’re working around the clock right now, and they will be until at least two weeks after the election.”

Woodall agrees with Eisen and Mandell that Wisconsin voters can be reassured about the election. 

“You have 1,800 clerks who are members of your community. Whether they’re newer at their jobs or they’ve been doing it for 20 years, they’re following procedures that haven’t changed, that were also the same in 2016 when President Trump did win.”

She also thinks the conspiracy theories are easy to puncture. The drop box issue, which has become so politicized, is  “the most simple issue for people to understand,” she said. “How on earth is a drop box that’s under video surveillance, bolted to the concrete and checked by two election officials, less secure than a United States Post Office blue box in a neighborhood, under no surveillance whatsoever, and picked up by one postal carrier?”

Other misinformation about elections is also easily dispelled if people look at the evidence. 

“You know, has anyone actually vandalized and taken ballots out of a drop box? Have we seen anyone actually voting in large numbers who shouldn’t be? … you start to realize that elections are, and have been and will continue to be really well run.”

So cheer up, Wisconsin. 

In Wausau, while citizens wait for the mayor to give back their drop box, the municipal clerk has instructed voters they can return their absentee ballots the same way they pay city fees — by dropping them in a secure mailbox at City Hall.