Today King County Elections counted 70,821 more ballots, for a total of 495,478 now tallied. That leaves about 273,522 more King County ballots still to be processed over the coming days—which means, at the rate the county's going, we'll be well into next week (no new results will be announced over the weekend) before all those ballots are tabulated.

However, we can now see some trends:

Democratic Senator Patty Murray's lead over Republican Dino Rossi continues to grow, and is now sitting at 51.45 percent to 48.55 percent statewide. That's enough for The Stranger to call the race for Murray. (So we assume we'll be receiving a copy of Rossi's concession speech any minute now...)

Democratic Congressman Rick Larsen's lead over Republican John Koster continues to grow as well, and is now sitting at 50.36 percent to 49.64 percent with 1,458 votes separating them.

And Supreme Court Justice Richard B. Sanders is still ahead of challenger Charlie Wiggins, 50.58 percent to 49.42 percent statewide with 16,261 ballots separating them. Watch for that margin to shrink even more as King County processes more ballots. The question is: Will the margin shrink by more than the current 16,261 vote difference?