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The organization that oversees the county's 20-year transportation plan and associated sales-tax funds has asked for a recount of the paper ballots from the 2006 Regional Transportation Authority election.

The request follows calls by others this week for a recount of those votes and a decision by the county treasurer to destroy the ballots.

Whether that recount can occur, or when it might happen, is unknown.

The RTA has called for the recount to settle the allegations of vote rigging and wrongdoing by the county elections division, said Gary Hayes, executive director of the RTA.

Even though voters approved the transportation plan by 60 percent of the vote, and the associated sales tax by 58 percent, the allegations that its passage was staged continue, Hayes said.

"In fairness to the majority of voters the Regional Transportation Authority is today requesting a recount of the 2006 vote. We are further offering to pay the costs of that recount because we believe it's time that the public's wishes be reaffirmed in the face of these allegations," Hayes wrote in a letter to Pima County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry Friday.

The RTA wants to shift the focus away from the allegations, Hayes said.

"We're just trying to move on and get to the business at hand and get to the projects the voters want built," Hayes said in an interview.

"All we're saying is we want to close it and if the issue is lack of funding, we'll pony up."

Such a recount would likely cost at least $20,000 to $30,000, said Huckelberry, who also said the letter would remove financial pressure from the county if a recount is ordered by a judge.

Therein lies the hitch, Huckelberry said.

"A judge has to authorize this or allow it," he said. "You can't recount them unless a court orders you to."

That means just because the authority overseeing the voter-approved, taxpayer-funded program wants a recount, it's not necessarily on the horizon.

The county has asked its attorneys on several occasions to request a recount, Huckelberry said. But unless there's a legal reason to recount them, the county could be "guilty of malpractice," he said.

This latest call for a recount comes after the Pima County Democratic Party spent more than a year in court to get electronic election databases from the county. Last month the Pima County treasurer sent the political parties a letter to say she planned to destroy the paper ballots because her legal obligation to keep them had expired.

The treasurer is required to keep the ballots for six months, but kept them longer because of the civil cases. Because those have been completed, Treasurer Beth Ford says she is no longer legally allowed to keep them without a court order.

The county Libertarian party sent the treasurer a letter this week opposing the ballot destruction, which means it will have to be decided by a judge, Ford said.

Election-integrity supporters say a recount would be welcome, but it may not solve all of the issues on the table.

A recount at the county level would settle the votes, but not the criminal allegations of tampering with the vote, which should be handled by the state Attorney General's Office, said Bill Risner, the attorney who represented the Democratic Party in the lawsuits.

The recount would put a lot of the issues to rest, as long as it could be trusted, said John Brakey, founder of Audit AZ, an election-integrity organization.

In his letter to the county administrator, the RTA's Hayes asks for the costs of the recount to be reimbursed by critics of the vote's accuracy.