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Elections databases that were supposed to be under lock and key at the clerk of the court ended up in the office of a top county official for two weeks instead.

The mistake was discovered when representatives of the Democratic Party, for whom they were being held, tried to arrange to pick them up on Monday.

After a preliminary check of the hard drive that held the data, elections-integrity activists said it appeared it had not been tampered with. But they are upset that county officials broke the chain of custody in violation of a Pima County Superior Court order.

County officials said it was a mistake, the result of human error, not malicious intent.

The Pima County Democratic Party successfully sued the county last year to obtain access to databases of past elections. It wants to analyze the databases to make sure election results were not tampered with by altering the way the computer counts the votes or reads the ballots.

The Democrats say doing these checks is an important part of their observer role in elections now that counting is done by computers, and the databases are available to other political parties.

At the beginning of the lawsuit, two copies of the elections databases were placed in a sealed box at the court clerk's office — one for the Democrats, the other for the county.

The county supervisors decided not to appeal the judge's decision back in June, clearing the way for the hard drives to be released.

But attorneys and computer experts for both sides wrangled through the summer about the procedure that should be followed in releasing the documents. The county wanted an electronic security code applied to the data so it couldn't be altered.

Eventually, Bill Risner, an attorney for the Democratic Party, asked a judge to order the release with no preconditions.

Risner said Monday that the Democrats don't have a problem with the security coding.

But he said a judge determined the databases are public record, and that means the county doesn't get to determine under what conditions it will release them or control what the public does with the data.

On Aug. 26, Judge Michael Miller ordered the computer files released to the Democrats and said the county could pick up its copy at the same time.

The next day, John Moffatt, a computer expert who works directly for County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry, said he was told the case was over and he could pick up the county's hard drive anytime.

He went to the clerk's office later that afternoon, and the clerk signed over a sealed box to him. He said he was told at the time that the Democrats already had picked up their hard drive.

Moffatt said he went back to his office, put the box in a filing cabinet in his office, locked the cabinet and didn't think anything else of it until he got an e-mail from an elections-integrity activist about arranging a time for both parties to retrieve their hard drives.

Moffatt responded that he already had the county's hard drive, and he believed Risner already had the Democrats' hard drive.

This news set off a frenzy of e-mails and phone calls among Democratic Party officials and elections-integrity activists, who thought the Democrats' hard drive had disappeared into unknown hands.

Then, as memories were jogged and people from both sides remembered both hard drives were placed in the same box but in separately sealed envelopes, there was consternation that the hard drives, which had been placed in court custody to prevent any tampering, had been in county custody for more than two weeks.

In a sometimes tense meeting at the court clerk's office on the first floor of the Superior Court building midday Monday, Risner questioned how both the county and the clerk's office could fail to thoroughly read the two-sentence court order.

"The suspects, for two weeks, have had everything," Risner said.

After finding all the seals intact, both sides agreed to open the Democrats' hard drive to make sure it still had data on it.

Jim March, a computer expert for the elections-integrity activists, said the main concern was whether the box had been exposed to any strong magnets to erase its contents.

The county copy was boxed up and returned to the clerk of the court, while the Democrats' copy was taken to Risner's office, where March copied it onto a brand-new, out-of-the-box laptop.

It had data. It looked like elections files. The activists were mollified, for now.