2000 Plymouth Voyager Possible Ignition Switch Problem

Hey Guys,

This is regarding a 2000 Plymouth Voyager SE V6 3.3L that is experiencing some ignition issues. 2 days ago my mother (who owns the car) said that she thought that the van broke down due to a bad connection to the battery. She cleaned the leads on the battery and the car started. Then, the next day the car died again.

I decided to take a look myself and noticed that the light around the key cylinder was on, there was a faint clicking noise, and the door open audible indicator (beeping) was going off (very staggered as though the key were being put into the key cylinder and then removed) even though the key was not in the lock. I could now see why the car battery was dying. Not to mention that the battery is only a year or two old.

To troubleshoot, I put the key into the lock and turned it all the way to the "On" position and then back off. This would sometimes make all of the different sound indicators stop, or sometimes it would gradually make things worse. If I turn the key to "accessories" there was no change. All audible alarms would still go off intermittently.

I took the key cylinder out and didn't find anything obviously broken and the key moves to each position just fine so my next suspect is the ignition switch. Is this a good next step? Do the symptoms sound about right to you? If the ignition switch is not a possible suspect what should I look at next? Any help would be much appreciated! Thanks!