The Wall Street Journal editorial board is no shy critic of Donald Trump and no fan of the Trump-inspired conservative populism that has remade and reenergized the Republican Party. So it’s nice to see that its members are finally paying attention to the results of the 2020 election — especially the razor-thin margin of Joe Biden’s victory.

In its lead item on today’s editorial page, the Journal’s board suggests that a recent report out of Wisconsin is worth our attention. It writes:

If curious Republicans want to know what really happened in 2020, this is the best summation to date. Released Dec. 7, it was written by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL), a policy shop with conservative bona fides that supported many of Mr. Trump’s policies. A Wisconsin judge this month said ballot dropboxes are illegal under state law, in a challenge brought by WILL.

Its report on 2020 wallops state officials for bending election rules amid the pandemic. That mistake put ballots into legal doubt, due to no fault of the voter, while fueling skepticism. Yet the stolen-election theory doesn’t hold up. President Biden won Wisconsin by 20,682, and mass fraud “would likely have resulted in some discernible anomaly,” WILL says. “In all likelihood, more eligible voters cast ballots for Joe Biden than Donald Trump.”

That’s entirely possible. But it’s far from certain, especially in light of some troubling facts that WILL uncovered. For example, in the overwhelmingly Democrat stronghold of Milwaukee alone, roughly 169,000 absentee ballots were cast. That’s about three times the total that were cast in the 2016 election. In addition, only 0.2% of Wisconsin’s absentee ballots were rejected in 2020, which is a colossal drop from the 1.35% of ballots that were rejected in 2016. Indeed, it’s nearly an order of magnitude. Think about it: Wisconsin rejected only two absentee votes for every 1,000 cast, whereas in the prior presidential election, officials rejected more than 13 per 1,000. In a state decided by the slimmest of margins — Joe Biden got 49.45% of the vote compared to Donald Trump’s 48.82% — the near nonexistence of faulty ballots strains credulity and demands skepticism.

The report also notes that Wisconsin used ballot drop boxes, which a state judge recently ruled were illegal. The report further notes that “many clerks didn’t sufficiently log chain of custody,” and it notes this critical finding: “Statistical analysis estimates that dropboxes maybe raised Mr. Biden’s turnout by 20,736.”

And that right there is his margin of victory.

Biden likes to crow that he beat Donald Trump by seven million votes, but total votes is and always has been a meaningless statistic in American elections. The electoral vote is all that matters, and there Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by just 43,000 spread across three states: Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin.

Could it be that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s money was enough to swing those three states into the Biden column? In her book Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections, Mollie Hemingway paints a compelling picture of a deeply flawed and undemocratic election that was decided more by money than by traditional theft. As her colleague John Daniel Davidson writes: “[Hemingway] doesn’t argue or allege that the election was stolen, but that it was corrupted by corporate media, Big Tech censorship, the courts, and Democratic activists. Taken together, it all amounted to heavy-handed election interference of a kind we have never seen before.”

And that’s it in a nutshell. Democrats used $419 million of Zuckerberg’s money to flood the zone with votes in Democrat-controlled areas and infiltrated supposedly nonpartisan election offices with their operatives. What a shock that Basement Joe Biden managed to win three decisive states by the slimmest of margins.

If the chaotic and largely unregulated bulk-mail ballot fraud that occurred in 2016 is allowed to become the new normal in 2020 and beyond, Republicans will be hard-pressed to win national elections — and they’ll have no one to blame but themselves.

For starters, weak-kneed Beltway Republicans need to stop saying “the election was fair.” It wasn’t, and they shouldn’t be afraid to say so.