Obsessive-compulsive Rossi-Gregoire update
Since my last update, two more counties, Ferry and Skagit, have added about 5,700 new votes to the pot. The margins have been slimmer, bringing Rossi’s total percent improvement to 1.1%–which would still give him a victory by 6,000 votes–and they’ve added net votes for him , 389 total after about 19,000 votes counted. If the count keeps going this way, Rossi will win by about 12,000 votes. King County, which should report their totals very soon, along with several other counties, still has the power to throw it one way or the other. The spreadsheet is updated.
UPDATE: Well, that was inconveniently timed. King county just counted 60,000 ballots, and support there for Rossi dropped 2.3%. If the rest of the King County ballots come in like this, support in the rest of the state will have to grow by 4.5% for him to pull it out. If the rest of the KC ballots are more like what they were before today, then he’ll still need a 3.3% bump. Even if he gets a bump statewide, including the rest of the King County ballots, it would have to be 2.2%. That’s not unlikely, though, depending on where in the county the last 47000 are coming from. The good news is that King County now has about as many ballots left to count as Spokane County, where Rossi should get a good boost. Whitman county added about 700 ballots just a bit ago as well, also boosting Gregoire, but only by 10 votes. The spreadsheet is updated again.
UPDATE 2: Whoops! I messed up bigtime on the last spreadsheet, forgetting to update the (much lower) number of uncounted King County votes, making things look far more dire for Rossi than they really were. But a whole bunch of counties dumped a pile of votes–we’re at about 250,000 for the day, I think–that went strongly for Rossi, so things are not dire at all right now. For the first time since I’ve been counting, if the uncounted votes from the rest of the counties line up exactly the way they the counted votes have–Rossi wins! By only 800 votes, but I’ll take it. Any uptick in votes at this point is just icing on the cake. Download the spreadsheet and see the good news for yourself.
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November 8th, 2004 at 9:18 pm
Keep at it, Tim.
Bookmarked.
November 8th, 2004 at 9:39 pm
I don’t know if you say Tim Zenik’s message to Gregoire supporters today (I get this from a secret source) but I thought I should start passing it along to my fellow pro-Rossi friends:
“We need to keep our campaign staff intact during this process so we can SEND PEOPLE INTO EVERY COUNTY IN THE STATE TO ENSURE THAT ALL THE VOTES ARE COUNTED.
“We must be prepared for anything in the coming weeks. We must leave nothing to chance. And WE NEED YOUR SUPPORT TO PREPARE.
“This process can cost tens of thousands of dollars in staff, TRAVEL, AND LEGAL FEES.”
Okay, the last few times I got that kind of rhetoric from another Democratic lawyer seeking higher office… it was in the event of another “Florida”. Something to stew on.
November 9th, 2004 at 11:55 am
Do you know if the current ‘yet to be counted’ numbers include provisional ballots?
November 9th, 2004 at 12:28 pm
I think they do, but I also think that they’ve probably already been sifted, so the numbers represent valid provisional ballots only. Maybe. It isn’t very clear from the SecState site, but I do get the impression that, once a county’s ticker gets to zero, then that’s the end of votes from that county (unless late absentees come in or something).
Josef, I wouldn’t worry too much about lawyerly shenanigans. Washington State has very clear election law, and a good, Republican secretary of state. There’s very little that the Gregoire camp can do if the count comes out for Rossi–or, for that matter, vice versa.
November 9th, 2004 at 1:09 pm
Good to hear on the election law