My letter to National Review, whose writers think only legal votes were counted in the 2020 election

Following is a letter I sent to the editors of National Review today in response to a piece by Dan McLaughlin that ran in the Nov. 7 issue of the magazine.

The piece McLaughlin wrote was about the many Secretary of State races with Republican candidates concerned about election integrity, in particular following the 2020 election.

National Review is certain they are conspiracy theorists, and that only legal votes were counted in the 2020 election.

Here’s my letter:

To the Editors:

I’m writing in regards to the Nov. 7 piece by Dan McLaughlin, “Republicans’ Secretary-of-State Problem” in which he writes that the 2020 election “has failed to yield plausible evidence that any illegality changed the outcome.” 

In fact, the election itself would not yield anything. An investigation would yield something, if there had been one. 

There was not. 

The FBI, the only investigative agency that had the resources to investigate what Rudy Giuliani described as a “common plan” across several states to skew the election for Biden, did not conduct an investigation. 

And perhaps McLaughlin, not realizing he’d gotten tangled in his words, did not realize that he’d also gotten tangled in sentences, and so couldn’t see the facts clearly. 

Illegality didn’t change the outcome? 

Is mass violation of state election laws meant to protect against fraud not illegality? 

Of course it is. 

McLaughlin seems unaware of the basic facts. 

Does he know what happened in Wisconsin? 

Wisconsin state law says that absentee ballots “shall not” be issued without an application first being received by the clerk, and if they by chance are, they “may not” be counted. See below:

6.84

Ballots cast in contravention of the procedures specified in those provisions may not be counted. Ballots counted in contravention of the procedures specified in those provisions may not be included in the certified result of any election.

6.86

Except as authorized in s. 6.875 (6), the municipal clerk shall not issue an absentee ballot unless the clerk receives a written application therefor from a qualified elector of the municipality. The clerk shall retain each absentee ballot application until destruction is authorized under s. 7.23 (1). Except as authorized in s. 6.79 (6) and (7), if a qualified elector applies for an absentee ballot in person at the clerk's office, the clerk shall not issue the elector an absentee ballot unless the elector presents proof of identification. The clerk shall verify that the name on the proof of identification presented by the elector conforms to the name on the elector's application and shall verify that any photograph appearing on that document reasonably resembles the elector. The clerk shall then enter his or her initials on the certificate envelope indicating that the absentee elector presented proof of identification to the clerk.

The language could not be more clear: "may not" and "shall not."

And yet, the clerks in Madison and Milwaukee, the two most heavily Democratic areas of the state, issued 170,140 absentee ballots with no application.

These are therefore illegal ballots.

They should not have been counted. They were issued and were counted in direct and clear violation of the law.

McLaughlin writes: “If one counts every legal vote, and only every legal vote under the proper standards, Joe Biden won and Donald Trump lost. It is impossible by now to honestly dispute this.” 

But the “proper standards” are the state election laws. 

And these were clearly broken.

Also, drop boxes are not legal under Wisconsin law, and never have been. Yet in the 2020 election, 528 drop boxes were used to collect ballots, with these unmonitored boxes placed almost entirely in heavily Democrat areas of Madison and Milwaukee.

The margin in Wisconsin between Biden and Trump was approximately 20,000 votes. 

170,140 illegal ballots out of Madison and Milwaukee would almost certainly have flipped the election result. Add another 30,000+ illegal ballots collected from drop boxes and it's clear that if only legal votes were counted, Trump would have won handily.

As for the courts, those of us who followed the legal challenges filed by the Trump campaign know what happened. There was no day in court. Every man gets his day in court, it is said. But President Trump was denied his. In Wisconsin, as everywhere else, there was no evidentiary hearing in any courtroom, no forum in which evidence could be presented and examined, no opportunity to subpoena witnesses to testify and to cross-examine witnesses. 

In Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and likely other states, major law firms were threatened and told they would lose most major corporate clients if they dared to represent the Trump campaign. 

(Does this have any precedent in American history? Is this consistent with a free society governed by the rule of law?)

One case did reach the Wisconsin State Supreme Court, where Trump was represented by a little old retired judge with an office in the small town of Cross Plains, west of Madison. He did what he could, and he did an admirable job, in particular when it came to the absentee ballot applications. The Democrats demurred, saying that the application was the same as the envelope, and he sharply responded that this made no sense given that state law says the envelope must be sent to one place and the application to the other – meaning that they couldn’t be the same thing at all and Madison and Milwaukee had violated the law. 

The case was quite close to a remarkable decision, and it could have gone in Trump’s favor but for a justice named Brian Hagedorn who, though a Republican, sided with the liberals on the court in saying that the envelope could be considered an application.

In a dissent, Justice Rebecca Bradley wrote that the decision to dismiss the case “leaves an indelible stain” on the 2020 election. 

The same, I believe, is true of National Review. Your misleading, and altogether false statements about the 2020 election will forever be a stain upon the magazine’s reputation. 

I don’t expect you’ll be able to get it out anytime soon, if ever. 

Best Regards, 

Margaret Menge, Bloomington, Ind.