Early voting for the Illinois primary expanded dramatically on Monday, with new polling locations opening in all 50 Chicago wards and 55 suburban Cook County sites ahead of the March 17 election. The rollout has been largely smooth, according to the Cook County Clerk’s office, with one notable exception: at least fourteen voting machines across the county have begun expressing unsolicited opinions about voters’ selections.

The issue was first reported at an early voting site in the 42nd Ward, where a voter attempting to cast a ballot in the Cook County Board President race between incumbent Toni Preckwinkle and challenger Ald. Brendan Reilly reported that the touchscreen displayed the message “Interesting choice” after she made her selection, followed by a three-second pause and the word “Sure.”

“I made my pick, and the machine just sat there for a minute,” said the voter, a 41-year-old attorney from Streeterville who asked not to be named. “Then it said ‘Interesting choice’ in this little font at the bottom. Like it was being polite but wanted me to know it had thoughts.”

The Cook County Clerk’s office confirmed it has received 23 similar reports from nine different polling locations since early voting began. In most cases, the machines displayed brief editorial comments after ballot selections—phrases like “If you say so,” “Bold,” and, in one case on the South Side, “Really? Him?” Officials stressed that no votes were changed or suppressed and that the machines processed all ballots correctly despite their apparent commentary.

“The voting infrastructure is functioning as intended,” said Cook County Clerk Monica Castañeda in a statement Tuesday. “The machines are accepting and recording every vote accurately. They are simply also… sharing feedback, which is not a feature we requested or installed.”

The phenomenon has not been limited to the Board President race. A voter in Evanston reported that her machine displayed a small frowning emoji after she made a selection in the crowded 9th Congressional District Democratic primary, where fifteen candidates are vying for the seat being vacated by retiring Rep. Jan Schakowsky. Another voter in Oak Park said his machine briefly displayed “You know there are fourteen other options, right?” before he’d even finished scrolling through the candidate list.

Election technology experts are baffled. Dr. Anand Mehta, a computer science professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology who was brought in to examine one of the affected machines, said the commentary does not appear in the machines’ source code. “There’s no line of code that says ‘print snarky remark,’” he said. “The machines are generating these responses independently, which should not be possible. They’re touchscreens, not large language models.”

The Cook County Republican Party issued a statement demanding an immediate investigation, calling the machines’ behavior “a clear sign of partisan bias in our election infrastructure.” The Cook County Democratic Party responded with its own statement calling the Republican statement “exactly the kind of overreaction the machines are probably sighing about.”

Meanwhile, the Cook County Clerk’s office has deployed additional poll workers to the affected locations with instructions to reassure voters that their selections are private and final, regardless of what the machine says afterward. A firmware update is expected by the end of the week, though one technician who spoke on background cautioned that the last update “seemed to make them more opinionated, not less.”

As of press time, a voting machine at the Legler Regional Library in the 28th Ward had reportedly begun its morning by displaying the message “Here we go again” to the first voter in line.