Cancellations by privacy-minded citizens represent extremely effective voter suppression: Simply by requesting voter rolls from states, the election panel has convinced people to take themselves out of the voting game. Keeping people from registering is a venerable voter-suppression technique—it was a staple of the Jim Crow south, achieved by placing barriers like poll taxes and literacy tests in the way of, or simply intimidating, would-be registrants—but this would be a modern and streamlined way to achieve the same result.

Kobach, a longtime crusader for stricter voting laws whose penchant for producing false positives for supposed fraudulent votes has become a leitmotif, embraced the idea that the commission is already causing voter self-suppression. In an interview with Breitbart, he speculated that those with concerns were actually the fraudulent voters.

“It’s interesting,” he said. “It could be a number of things. It could be, actually, people who are not qualified to vote, perhaps someone who is a felon and is disqualified that way, or someone who is not a U.S. citizen saying, ‘I’m withdrawing my voter registration because I am not able to vote.’”

The epicenter for voter withdrawal is Colorado, where almost 4,000 voters had canceled their registrations as of earlier this week. Amber McReynolds, the director of the city of Denver’s elections division, estimated that 700 to 800 of those were in the Mile-High City.

“I’ve been reading through a lot of emails, and I spoke to voters myself. They’ve absolutely been stating it’s because of privacy concerns,” she said. “It’s very disheartening. I’ve done this for over 12 years. I never thought I would come to work and see more withdrawals in a week than registrations.”

But Colorado is an outlier, at least so far. In Pasco County, Florida, for example, elections supervisor Brian Corley said the number of concerned citizens getting in touch had surprised him. “It’s really surreal to be honest with you,” he said. But he told me that he and his staff had been begging voters not to cancel registrations, and that as far as he knew, those pleas were successful: Only three Pasco County voters—out of some 350,000—had actually canceled their registrations.

Officials in some other jurisdictions also reported that despite widespread concern about the Trump commission’s request, they weren’t seeing an unusually large number of canceled registrations. The North Carolina State Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement has received hundreds if not thousands of messages of concern about the elections commission, spokesman Patrick Gannon said, and at least one person has written to the board asking to cancel their registration because of the collection. But he said the state board doesn’t have a tally of how many cancellations have occurred, because counties handle both registration and withdrawal.