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.

On the same day he referred to his loss to Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin as "brutally hard and painful" and a "gut-wrenching punch to the solar plexus" in a radio interview, Republican U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde also posted a video leaving open the possibility of requesting a recount.

Republican Eric Hovde admitted he lost his U.S. Senate race to incumbent Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., Tuesday, but stopped short of conceding, expressing concerns about the integrity of Milwaukee’s election results.

Wisconsin Republican Eric Hovde is admitting that he lost the U.S. Senate race to Democratic incumbent Tammy Baldwin, but refusing to concede and instead is repeating misleading claims about the election while he considers a recount.

Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D) said it is "time for Hovde to stop this disgusting attack on our democracy and concede.”

Eric Hovde, the Wisconsin Republican who nearly unseated Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin, acknowledged this week that he lost the election but also raised questions about the legitimacy of the result as he mulls requesting a recount.

His campaign received some funding from Democratic donors in what Hovde said was an effort to siphon votes from him. While it's a tactic that the GOP has also used to prop up candidates on the opponents' left flank,

Two right-of-center candidates backed by Democratic-aligned operatives secured significant vote shares in Wisconsin’s closely-decided Senate race. Thomas Leager and Phillip Anderson, an independent and a Libertarian,