King County tabulating slower than expected

King results just posted, and apparently, someone in the Elections Director's office is determined to keep me in business for the foreseeable future (thanks, but I do have an appellate brief due on Monday).

King reported counting 18,236 ballots today.  To summarize, we've gone from 71,915 counted Monday, to 49,017 counted yesterday, to 18,236 counted today.  Even being generous and assuming a 50% rate of decay each day, and assuming no new ballots are added to the EBOH total, we'll be down to counting 1 ballot per day by November 30th, one full week after the deadline to certify this race.  And there will still be over 46,000 ballots left to count.  Depressing.

But getting back on track, it looks like the SMOV% in King dropped back down to 38.31% (it was 38.32% on Monday but jumped to 38.51% yesterday).  So it's unlikely we'll see much of a change in the remainder of the King ballots.

Updating the predictive model that I posted just a minute ago, the reduced ballot count from King only provides Wiggins with a 2,902 vote pickup out of that county.  That leaves Wiggins only picking up +305 net new votes today.  Add that to the totals from earlier, and the model projects that Wiggins will end the day with a +2,492 vote lead.  Really brings King's effect on this race into perspective.

[UPDATE (4:57pm):  I assumed, without checking, that King County's VCR% rate would stay the same, as it has, around 68-69%.  Today, it jumped to 74.19%, which is about on order with King's original averages last Thursday.  This actually produced a net vote gain of 3,163 for Wiggins out of King today.  Figure him around +2,753 overall at the end of the day.]

[UPDATE #2 (5:45pm):  It turns out there *is* a reason why King County's counting has slowed down - voter stupidity mistakes.  Check out the great explanation from Goldy at HA.]