Ammons lays out primary election plans for Champaign Co.
URBANA, Ill. (NEXSTAR) — Champaign remains the only county in Central and Southern Illinois that allows voters to go to any polling place to cast their ballot on election day.
The county will be relying on voters to do that this year, as it announced that 15 polling centers will be closed for the primary election due to a shortage of election judges.
The county needed 232 election judges to fully staff all of the usual polling places, but as of Tuesday, they had only recruited 178.
In an interview prior to this announcement being made, Champaign County Clerk Aaron Ammons said his office had been working with both political parties, community groups and voting advocacy groups to recruit the judges. The county met its threshold for Democrat judges with 112, but only 66 Republican judges signed up.
“I have taken it upon myself, and I believe other administrations have as well to try to, to recruit in the best way that we can or to make it known that we’re looking for more judges,” Ammons said in late February. “Those civic organizations as well as the parties are really supposed to be the entities that help recruit election judges, it is not really the responsibility of the election authority. We have done some work around that we are working with the parties and those civic organizations, we’re trying our best to recruit a judges.”
If your polling location was closed due to the shortage, voters can head to any other polling location in the county to cast their ballot. Ammons said the county is well prepared otherwise for this election to run smoothly.
“We’re very confident that it’s going to be a smooth election,” Ammons said. “There’s always something in an election, there is no such thing as a flawless election. There’s always something low fire that we’ve got to put out for some reason. So we always were prepared for that.”
Champaign County started the voting center system during the 2022 election. Ammons said they have learned lessons in the past few years to address prior issues. In the 2022 general, the county computer system got bogged down when voters went to the polls. The county prints ballots as soon as a voter requests them at every polling place, but there were delays in printing ballots during that election. Ammons said they have a contingency plan this year if they run into issues with the computers again.
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That plan is to still print on demand, but also have an emergency supply of ballots for voters that live in that voting center’s precinct. That way, if the system slows down, they already have ballots ready for people to keep lines moving.
“What should have happened was we should have pulled from the emergency ballots and the paper poll book emergency poll book, looked up the person if they lived in the Ogden area, then they would have been able to vote there. So that’s why we still have the voter registration cards,” Ammons said.
Ammons said the voting center system does not delay results from being issued from his office. Ballots are tabulated the same way as they were before.
“A lot of people think that the election results are somehow connected to this (voting center) system, or to vote by mail or something like that,” Ammons said. “The reality is the polling locations. And when those election judges finish, their closing procedures dictates how soon we can share that data with the public.”
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Some campus locations have dealt with long lines that last even after the time polls were scheduled to close. State law requires polling places to stay open for every person that is in line prior to the scheduled closing time. The delay is often caused by many of the students in line choosing to register to vote on election day, according to Ammons.
“Most of the students are going to be grace registering, which is probably more of a four to five minute process of registration,” Ammons said. “And voting takes them about four or five minutes each to get that done. And if there are any complications, if they don’t have everything that they need, it could be even longer. So you could have a place like the ARC, where there are fewer voters than say, Mahomet, but it’s going to take longer for that for those judges at the ARC to get their information and to get the ballots and the thumb drive back to us.”
Ammons also said the county continues to see a strong vote by mail turnout. Those ballots are not able to be counted before the polls close on election night, and any ballot postmarked by election day will still be counted, as long as it is received within 14 days after election day.
“So you can’t call a winner, because there’s too many ballots out there that could change that outcome,” Ammons said. “But it is only the vote by mail ballots, not the vote centers or the early voting process that would cause you all to wait on those 14 days before you could call that race.”
Early voting is open at 12 different polling locations up until election day on March 19th. Officials from both parties said that early voting would help offset any potential issues caused by the closure of the polling places.
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