MACON COUNTY, Ill. (WAND) - The trial for the 2018 Macon County Sheriff’s race continued on Wednesday with testimony from witnesses.
At the beginning of the day, Champaign County Judge Anna M. Benjamin denied the recent motion filed by Chris Sherer, Sheriff Tony Brown’s attorney.
During the morning and afternoon, witnesses took the stand. One was an election judge from Hickory Point precinct where two ballots were discovered.
The witness told the judge he was closing out the tabulation machine at the end of the evening on election night.
One of the duties before getting the final total off the machine is checking a locked box on the back where election judges can place ballots into.
The witness explained he found two ballots in the locked box on one of the tabulation machines. He fed them through and then moved onto the next one. Before checking the locked box the witness said he forgot the check the locked box so when he did after getting the total, he found two ballots.
He took these to another election judge, who said he would get them to Steve Bean, the Macon County clerk at the time.
Former County Clerk Steve Bean took the stand and said he didn’t receive any notice of the two found ballots until two days later, when they showed up on his desk.
Questioning from both attorney concluded and how the ballots got to the desk is unclear. However, Bean admitted that he had placed them into the vault and forgot about them until days after. Bean admitted this is not the proper procedure laid out by the clerk's office for securing ballots.
In addition, other election judges took the stand to discuss different discrepancies they ran into on the 2018 General Election. Some issues they cited were ballots not being fed into the machine correctly and what the process was to correct it.
One witnesses testified and said if there was an issue with an absentee ballot not going through the machine, the election judge would copy the votes from the damaged and make a duplicate ballot.
Testimony concluded Wednesday afternoon and will resume Monday, Jan. 25.
The race between Democrat Tony Brown and Republican Jim Root, which initially came down to one vote, led to a trial involving 1,337 contested ballots.
On Nov. 20, 2019, the Macon County Clerk named Tony “Chubby” Brown as sheriff with 19,655 votes. Brown won by one vote over Root. A full recount was done and revealed on July 24, 2020. It showed Brown ahead by 18 votes with 1,394 remaining ballots contested and uncounted ballots.
