Correction version: An earlier version of this story had an incorrect photo.

A Pima County Superior Court judge has again ordered Pima County to turn over electronic databases from past elections to the Pima County Democratic Party.

The county wanted a code placed on the databases, but Judge Michael Miller rejected the request Tuesday.

Miller in May ruled in favor of the party in a lawsuit filed to obtain the elections databases dating to the late 1990s to examine whether the county’s computerized vote and ballot tabulating systems are susceptible to hacking.

Miller said county attorneys had failed to prove that turning the databases over to the Democrats and any other political parties would create security threats.

The judge ordered the county to turn over electronic databases from past and future elections to all parties.

But county officials have balked on releasing them, arguing that the databases first should be given a code to ensure those held by the court are identical when turned over to both parties in the case.

Miller reserved judgment on whether the databases of future elections would be marked with a “cryptographic hash” as sought by the county for all the elections databases.

The county proposed a process where they could have polluted the data,” Bill Risner, attorney for the Pima County Democratic Party, said Wednesday.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 28th, 2008 at 12:01 am and is filed under Elections, Local. Tags for this post: County, Elections-County, Garry Duffy, Local-Sci/Tech, page-a05, Sci/Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.