[13] Illinois counties have the option of using or rejecting the township form of providing local services.

In the years before World War I, Menard was a German Catholic and thus Democratic county, opposed to the pietism of Yankee Protestant Northern Illinois.

[citation needed] Theodore Roosevelt in 1904 was the only Republican to carry the county in this time span.

However, resistance against Woodrow Wilson’s participatory attitude during World War I allowed Charles Evans Hughes to carry Menard County in 1916 by a mere four votes (Hughes lost the national election).

Apart from these three 400-electoral vote Democratic landslides, George H. W. Bush in 1992 is the sole Republican candidate since 1920 to fail to win a majority in Menard County.

Jimmy Carter and Illinois-bred Barack Obama are the only Democrats since 1964 to reach forty percent of Menard County’s vote.