Pima County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry says he's unaware of any plans to destroy the ballots from the 2006 RTA election, as alleged by attorney Bill Risner in a press release yesterday.

"I have said, 'Do not destroy them under any circumstances,'" Huckelberry says. "My instructions to the county attorney were to go to court if necessary to prevent those ballots from being destroyed."

Huckelberry says he'll be sending out a memo today to request that the County Attorney's Office prevent County Treasurer Beth Ford to not destroy the ballots.

Huckelberry says he'd be delighted to recount the ballots but the law prevents the county from doing so.

"We could have saved $250,000, $300,000 in attorney's fees and all the aggravation we've gone through over the last two years we would have been just allowed to recount the ballots," says Huckelberry, who points out that under state law, the ballots should have been destroyed already, had it not been for the county's decision to hang onto them. "It demonstrates how archaic election law in Arizona is."

Huckelberry quotes Charles Dickens: "The law is an ass."