Brad Friedman Byon 5/30/2008, 6:35am PT

Last week we told you about the hard fought victory by the Pima County (Tucson), Arizona, Democrats to finally gain access to the Diebold databases which include the tallies of how folks voted in elections going all the way back to 1998.

The county had argued (on Diebold's behalf, natch) that the database files were both proprietary, and a security risk should they be released. The judge, finally, found that to be nonsense, and ordered the release of the files which the local Election Integrity advocates now hope to comb over for evidence of fraud and/or other malfeasance.

Now that they've got all the info, they're seeking a geek or two who may be able to help build a tool to make it a bit easier to go through the mountains of data they now finally have access to.

AZ's Libertarian Election Integrity champ Jim March, whose been working closely with the Dems, sends us the following "Help Wanted" ad, seeking a programmer to help 'em make sense of "the world's largest private collection of Diebold election data files anywhere." (Note: If someone could kindly Slashdot this item to maximize the number of coder geek eyeballs it gets in front of, it'd be much appreciated!)...

The Pima Dems now have the world's largest private collection of Diebold election data files anywhere - going back to 1998.The volume of data for each election is so enormous that only automated "sanity check" tools can have any hope of wading through this pile, plus the data ordered for future elections - never mind that the same data should be available elsewhere. To help process this unruly mess, Pima Dems consultant Jim March (footnote: who is actually a Libertarian but they forgive him) has designed the "feature specs" for a test tool. Now they need somebody to code it. The spec sheet for the tool may be downloaded here [PDF]. The "mark one" version can be very basic, command line driven and workable only with Diebold databases for now. HELP WANTED: Computer programmer on this contract (paid) project with a donor already lined up. Must be very competent in database programming in general, the Microsoft JET database engine in particular.The project can be coordinated by EMail. Note that the tool will be "open source" - free for download by ANYBODY, both running program and source code so anybody can see how it works and modify it as needed if we get election data files from any other vendor for instance. I *know* there's geeks reading Bradblog, folks. Speak up! And email me here if you're interested, or have any questions.

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