Twenty-eight people in Champaign County, Illinois, already cast their votes before anyone noticed the ballots were wrong. A county executive race had been mislabeled as a Congressional race. Nine precincts. Nineteen different ballot types. Nearly 600 voters received ballots with incorrect candidate names — and the man running the elections is under federal indictment.
His name is Aaron Ammons. He's the Champaign County Clerk and Recorder.
The House Administration Committee — the body that oversees federal elections — sent Ammons a letter on October 9 demanding answers. Committee Chairman Bryan Steil, a Republican from Wisconsin, and Rep. Mary Miller, a Republican from Illinois who represents parts of Champaign County, didn't mince around the edges. Their letter stated flatly: "On Monday, October 5, your office announced that nearly 600 voters received ballots with incorrect names of candidates for public office."
The errors were discovered on October 1 when staff caught a problem on a single ballot. Investigating that one led to a bigger discovery: data had been incorrectly entered by a third-party vendor, and an internal quality check failed to catch it. Early voting was suspended entirely while the mess got sorted.
Steil and Miller wrote that "ballot printing errors and unilateral suspensions in voting undermine public confidence in the nation's elections." Miller went further in a separate statement: "This can no longer be brushed off as an isolated mistake. Voters deserve accountability and proof the Clerk's office can run a reliable election in November."
Here's the part that makes the whole thing move from incompetence to something darker. Aaron Ammons is currently facing a federal indictment for conspiracy to obstruct justice — specifically, instructing a witness to "muddy the waters" with the FBI. His wife, State Rep. Carol Ammons, is facing her own federal corruption charges for allegedly converting campaign funds to personal use and steering state grant money to nonprofits that employed her daughter. Their trial is set for December 7 in Springfield.
This isn't his first election-night adventure, either. In 2022, Champaign County experienced computer problems on Election Day that Ammons's office initially described as a cyberattack. In 2024, a network outage hit on Election Day and the vendor took the blame. During the primary this cycle, the office misprinted a gubernatorial candidate's first name — "Tad" instead of "Ted" Dabrowski.
House Republican Leader Tony McCombie and Illinois GOP Chair Bob Grogan called for the state Attorney General to intervene. McCombie's logic was straightforward: "With federally indicted County Clerk Aaron Ammons overseeing the response, the Attorney General's Office should step in immediately." She and Grogan wrote that "providing hundreds of voters with incorrect ballots is no mere technical issue."
The 28 voters who already cast ballots on the wrong forms cannot change their votes. State Rep. Brandun Schweizer, the Republican incumbent in the 104th District, won his 2024 race by just 269 votes. He posted on social media: "My last race was close... We cannot afford to wait."
Bob Grogan, the state GOP chair, offered the simplest summary anyone's managed so far: "They say you can't fix stupid, but you can vote it out of office."
Ammons is still the county clerk. The trial is in December. The election is in November.