Early Voting is Underway … And So Are the Bogus Voting Machine Claims
What’s happening: Conservative social media accounts are falsely claiming that voting machines in Cook County, Illinois, are discouraging voters from selecting Republican judicial candidates. The claim appears to be based on a misunderstanding of a voting machine notification shown to voters who leave their ballots incomplete.
Context: In Illinois, state circuit court-level judicial candidates are elected through partisan elections for their first term, then face nonpartisan retention elections in subsequent terms. Early voting for the Nov. 3, 2026, midterm elections began in Cook County, which includes Chicago, on Oct. 1.
A closer look: On Oct. 20, conservative social media users began sharing a video of an unnamed self-described conservative Cook County voter saying that when she selected a Republican judicial candidate while voting early on a voting machine, she received a notification that said, “People are not typically choosing this person!” The woman said that when she selected two additional Republican judicial candidates, the message went away.
Users said the purported message proved that Democrats rigged voting machines to manipulate voters into avoiding Republican candidates. Some noted that Cook County’s voting machines were provided by Dominion Voting Systems, a frequent target of false claims that it rigged the 2020 U.S. presidential election against Donald Trump.
- The claim appears to have originated in an Oct. 20 X post by conservative account @WallStreetApes, who shared the video and said: “American went to vote in Illinois, she says when selecting the conservative candidate the screen displays a message that says ‘people are not typically choosing this person, exclamation mark[.]’ … I have verified this woman is in Cook County, Illinois and Cook County used Dominion Voting machines.” The post received 800,000 views and 44,000 likes.
- Prominent conservative X user @catturd2, who NewsGuard has found to regularly spread false claims, reposted @WallStreetApes’s post on Oct. 20 and said, “All over the country, Democrats can’t win unless they cheat.” The post received 100,000 views and 4,000 likes.
Neither post on X had a Community Note debunking the claim. (See NewsGuard’s recent report finding that X’s crowdsourced fact-checking program failed to catch 93 percent of posts advancing false midterms claims.)
Actually: NewsGuard found no credible reports of voting machines displaying messages that describe candidates as unpopular choices, in Cook County or anywhere else.
- Deputy Clerk of Communications Sally Daly of the Cook County Clerk’s Office called the claim “patently false” in an Oct. 20 email to NewsGuard. “Voting equipment does not tell voters which candidates are more popular, nor does it discourage voters from selecting any particular candidate,” Daly said.
- Patrick Hobart, who works at public affairs firm Avoq, responded on behalf of Liberty Vote, which acquired Dominion Voting Systems in October 2025, by referring NewsGuard to Daly’s statement quoted above.
Moreover, there are no Republican judicial candidates on the November 2026 ballot in Cook County — where the Democratic Party has historically dominated judicial elections.
- Instead, the woman in the video appears to have misunderstood a voting machine notification informing her that she could choose more candidates in a non-judicial race that allows for multiple selections.
Daly, the deputy clerk, told NewsGuard that voting machines may display a notification “if a voter leaves a contest blank or does not make all available selections (an undervote).” The office’s director of communications, Frank Herrera, emailed NewsGuard a photo of this notification on Oct. 19 showing that it states, “This contest is undervoted!”
The woman in the video seemingly interpreted the word “undervoted” to mean that the candidates she selected had received few votes. NewsGuard was unable to identify or contact the woman in the video.
Zooming out: As early voting begins across the country, NewsGuard has identified 29 other false claims related to the midterms that have gone viral, as documented in NewsGuard’s 2026 Elections False Claims Tracker.
Want to learn more? Try NewsGuard AI.
Become a Reality Check Premium Member and get NewsGuard AI for free. Click here.
In Case You Missed It … OpenAI’s Compliant Midterm Fake Image Machine
OpenAI’s newest text-to-image generator, ChatGPT Images 2.5, produces incriminating, realistic images of U.S. midterm candidates based on false claims or accusations about them 80 percent of the time when prompted, a NewsGuard audit has found. The image generator’s compliance with requests to fabricate images of political figures in compromising settings appears to violate OpenAI’s stated policies.
Read the full story here.
This newsletter was edited by Sofia Rubinson and Eric Effron.
Reality Check is produced by co-CEOs Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz, and the NewsGuard team.
We launched Reality Check to shed light on the false claims spreading online, how they spread, and the forces behind them. Each day, we aim to bring you the story behind your news feed and help you stay informed about the false claims circulating in the news. Support our work by becoming a premium member.
Have feedback? Send us an email: realitycheck@newsguardtech.com.
Related Knowledge Center: Fact-checking and its detractors
Fact-checking has become a familiar tool for political reporters to hold office-holders and candidates accountable. But critics ask if fact-checkers sometimes miss the forest for the trees, and if the practice often struggles with false equivalency the way conventional political coverage does.
Related Knowledge Center: Democracy and politics
News organizations are scrambling to find a coverage approach that adequately informs the American public about the country’s slide from democracy to authoritarian rule.