Macon Reporter

The trial to determine the integrity of the 2018 Macon County Sheriff’s race recently continued on Jan. 20, according to WAND 17 News.

The heated 2018 race between Democrat Tony Brown and Republican Jim  Root was initially decided by one vote and led to a trial involving 1,337 contested ballots. On Nov. 20, 2019, Tony “Chubby” Brown was declared sheriff with 19,655 votes. Following a full recount on July  24, 2020, Brown was found to have been ahead by 18 votes with 1,394 remaining ballots contested and uncounted ballots.

Champaign County Judge Anna M. Benjamin started by denying the motion filed by Sheriff Tony Brown’s attorney, Chris Sherer. For the rest of the day, the Judge heard testimony from witnesses.

The first witness to take the stand was an election judge from Hickory Point, the precinct where two crucial ballots were discovered. He told the judge that he found two ballots in the locked box on one of the tabulation machines when he was closing it out at the end of election night.

He forwarded these uncounted ballots to another election judge to get to the then Macon County clerk at the time, Steve Bean.

Bean took the stand and said that he had no knowledge of the two discovered ballots until he found them on his desk two days later. It is unclear how or when the ballots got to his desk, but Bean admitted that he locked them in the vault and forgot about them until days later.

Other election judges took the stand and discussed other issues they experienced during the 2018 General Election including ballots not being fed into the machine correctly.

One election judge testified that if an absentee ballot was too damaged to go through the machine, he would copy the votes from the damaged ballot to make a duplicate ballot to be fed through the machine.