My friend the Republican vote count observer reports some very good news for Dino Rossi:

We wrapped up in the MBOS [Mail Ballot Operations Satellite] facility at about 2:00 today, with the following survey numbers:

Rossi 458, or 42%

Gregoire 542, or 49%

Other (no governor vote, the Libertarian candidate, or a write-in) 113, or 10%

Head to head, the ratio is 46% for Rossi versus 54% for Gregoire.

Based upon the percentages, Rossi ended on a high note. A possible explanation for today’s sudden improvement is that many of the final provisional ballots to be duplicated in King County were ballots that had been cast in other counties (but in which the voter was registered in King County).

We had a much larger sample size today than yesterday, relative to the actual number of duplicated ballots. Since fewer ballots were duplicated today, I suspect that the percentage of King County votes for Rossi in the batch to be tabulated and reported on Monday (which includes all ballots handled since 4:00 on Friday) will rise slightly from the survey projection sent to you yesterday. I cannot envision a scenario in which Monday’s results from King County will be worse than last Friday’s.

Until today, we were worried that a disproportionate number of Seattle ballots might have remained in the final 11,000 to be counted by King County, but this just did not occur.