A top Florida elections official testified in federal court on Monday that as many as 85,000 voters might be ineligible to cast ballots in the battleground state, but it could take years for the state to figure out who should be removed from the voting rolls.
Maria Matthews, director of the state Division of Elections, said the state has flagged thousands of voters who have been convicted of a felony. The voters might be serving a prison sentence or have convictions for murder or sex offenses that would make them ineligible to vote under Amendment 4, a measure that ended the state’s lifetime ban on voting for most people who have served time for felonies.
A potential purge of voters in Florida, which has more than 13.7 million registered voters, could have out-sized impact, because many elections are won or lost on narrow margins. President Donald Trump won Florida in 2016 by fewer than 113,000 votes.