Follow-up to this morning's post discussing the P-I's claim that King County isn't turning out very well.

In addition to the skepticism I noted (including their potential consideration of poll voters), there's another reason to doubt the P-I's assertion. A loyal reader reminded me of an issue I've run into with larger counties when tracking absentee/mail-in ballots left to be counted.

The being, there is a lag of a day or two (sometimes even more) between when the elections office receives a batch of ballots and when that batch is actually processed for counting...which is the point at which the county actually reports the ballot as "received."

Thus, we will probably see ballots remaining to be counted increase in large counties, including King, throughout this coming week. Even as they're counting away, the influx of late-arriving ballots will still be in process, and consequently not quickly appearing on reported lists of remaining ballots.

Final issue to keep in mind: ballot dropoff. In 2004, 2.883 million ballots were counted. 2.859 million of those had votes for President. And 2.810 had votes for Governor. I have no idea how that will play out this year.