"It's an impossible task to do properly," said Ion Sancho, the supervisor in Leon County, in the Florida panhandle.
The paucity of Hispanic voters on the felon list was first reported Wednesday by The Sarasota Herald-Tribune, but officials said then that the problem was not systematic. After The New York Times examined the data, state officials acknowledged that the method for matching lists of felons to those of voters automatically exempted all felons who identified themselves as Hispanic.
Hispanic Republicans outnumber Hispanic Democrats by about 100,000 voters in Florida. But more than 90 percent of the approximately 1 million registered blacks there are Democrats. The exclusion of Hispanics from the purge list explains some of the wide discrepancy in party affiliation of voters on the felon list, which bears the names of 28,025 Democrats and just 9,521 Republicans, with most of the rest unaffiliated.
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