JUNEAU, Alaska – The lawyers have started leaving.

That is perhaps the surest sign that Joe Miller’s chances of becoming the next senator from Alaska are evaporating. With each passing day that election workers here in the state capital manually count write-in votes cast for Senator Lisa Murkowski, it appears increasingly likely that Alaskans spell too well for Mr. Miller’s math to work.

Assisted by lawyers sent by the Republican National Senatorial Committee, the Miller campaign set out to challenge every smudge, stray mark and misspelling they could find (and, often, only they could find) on write-in votes that appeared to be for Ms. Murkowski.

The plan was to question enough votes to close the 11,000-vote margin by which he trails – and then to convince the courts that those challenged votes should be discounted.

Alaska law says write-in votes will be counted if the name or last name is written “as it appears” on the candidate’s declaration form. But state election officials, citing legal precedent in the state, said they would count all votes in which they could determine “voter intent,” misspellings aside.

Now the dispute could become irrelevant. After three days of counting, the state has determined that 98 percent of write-in ballots were cast for Ms. Murkowski – and 90 percent of those were cast so cleanly that they have survived even the sometimes bafflingly strict scrutiny applied by monitors working for Mr. Miller.

Even if every ballot his campaign has challenged was thrown out in court, which is not likely, Mr. Miller could gain less than 10,000 votes. Several thousand absentee ballots that remain to be counted could help him narrow the margin, but not likely enough for him to win. The write-in count is expected to last several more days.

“The numbers are all on our side,” said Kevin Sweeney, Ms. Murkowski’s campaign manager.

Ben Ginsberg, a Republican lawyer who worked on the Florida recount in the 2000 presidential campaign and was brought to Juneau to work for Ms. Murkowski, flew out on Friday night. At least three of the seven lawyers that the National Republican Senatorial Committee hired to help Mr. Miller will have left by Saturday.

Mr. Miller told ABC News on Thursday that, “if the numbers of the challenged ballots don’t add up, we aren’t going to sit back and continue to contest this.”

But he appears far from ready to give up at this point. While some lawyers paid for by the senatorial committee were leaving, Mr. Miller sent an email to potential supporters seeking donations to keep up the fight. In the letter he reiterated claims his campaign has made this week, from allegations of voter fraud to the withholding of public records by the state. He also said that Ms. Murkowski, by running as a write-in after she lost to Mr. Miller in the Republican primary in August, “single-handedly sentenced the state to a divisive and expensive election.”

“We need your help in this fight. We’re going up against state bureaucrats, the media and powerful insiders to keep Murkowski entrenched in D.C.,” the letter said. “Click here to donate $100, $75, $50, or $25 today to the Joe Miller for U.S. Senate Recount Fund.”

Sarah Palin, who endorsed Mr. Miller, has donated $5,000 to the fund through her political action committee. (A former aide to Ms. Palin and a former employee of her political action committee, Ivy Frye, has been working as an observer for Mr. Miller during the write-in count.)

The Miller campaign has brought in Floyd Brown, a controversial conservative activist who produced the Willie Horton attack ads against Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts in the 1988 presidential race. Two days in a row, Mr. Brown held press conferences in the same room in which the ballots were being counted.

On Friday he said the campaign had received 300 “legitimate” claims of voter fraud or intimation through a telephone hotline it set up the day before. He showed four affidavits he said documented potential voter fraud. At least three of them were from people who either work or volunteer for the Miller campaign. One has held fundraisers for Mr. Miller

“Joe Miller will be the next United States senator from the state of Alaska,” Mr. Brown said.