Increased privacy concerns have led to changes in the way military and colleges report data, making it more difficult to separate nonresidents from residents in crafting new voting districts, officials with the state Reapportionment Commission reported.

The commission previously voted 8-1 to include nonresident members of the military and their dependents along with nonresident students and incarcerated felons in the state’s population base for the purposes of redrawing political boundaries, with some members citing the inability to accurately extract nonresidents from the population base as their primary reason for including them.

Members have stated that if those populations could be accurately removed, they would consider taking another vote.

Inclusion of those nonresident groups, unlike in recent years, maintains a greater population base on Oahu, negating gains made on neighbor islands that would have shifted a state Senate seat to Hawaii island from Oahu.