Connecting LEDs and push buttons 12 feet away from Arduino UNO
That is a big no-no. You are adding extremely long antennas to the Arduino asking for problems. At a minimum on the inputs add a 10K series resistor at the Arduino pins.  My preference would be to put the capacitors at the arduino pins to help decouple noise etc as well as the pull up resistors on the wire side of the 10K resistors. Use a buffer of some type for the LEDs, a transistor would work. This may work but for how long and how many processors can you destroy over time.