I just did a quick and dirty analysis of Decline to State voters in LA County to see what the possible effect of the Double Bubble ballot could be. My estimate is that counting all possible “Double Bubble” ballots could lead to a statewide shift to Obama of between 0.5% and 1.5%. In LA County the shift would be between 1.8% and 5%. In table form, here’s what I think the change would be to the statewide results:

	Current	Probable
Hillary	52.0%	51.7%
Barack	42.3%	42.6%

Because this nomination could come down to every last single delegate, I think Debra Bowen and the LA County Department of Elections need to examine all “Decline to State” ballots and count any ballots where the voter failed to fill in the byzantine “Democratic” bubble. I wouldn’t consider this a national emergency because Hillary won Cali by 10%, but the “double bubble” ballot needs to be eliminated. See after the jump for my analysis.

First, here are the total LA results:

HILLARY CLINTON   658,937 (55.01%)

BARACK OBAMA   496,192 (41.43%)

and total CA results:

HILLARY CLINTON   2,132,166 (51.96%)

BARACK OBAMA   1,735,105 (42.29%)

From the LA Election Results text file, we find these totals for voter turnout:

DEMOCRATIC   1,139,072 (57.67%)

NONPARTISAN (NP) 189,438 (23.44%)

Here’s our first clue that there isn’t a massive pool of potential disenfranchised: only 189,438 of the 808,126 “Decline to State” voters actually voted on Tuesday. Let’s look at the most extreme possibility that all of the Democrats and DTS voters attempted to vote in the Democratic primary:

1,139,072 + 189,438 = 1,328,510 potential voters

Total votes counted: 1,197,785

1,328,510 Potential votes – 1,197,785 actual votes = 130,725 possible missing votes

The Exit Polls say that Barack beat Hillary by 2-1 among DTS voters. If we take a rough stab at that, we give Hillary 1/3rd of the possible missing votes and Barack 2/3rds:

130,725 * 1/3 = 43575 for Hillary

130,725 * 2/3 = 87150 for Barack

Adding it all up in LA, we get this for what the most extreme possible effect of the Double Bubble:

HILLARY CLINTON  702,512 (52.88%) a loss of 2.13%

BARACK OBAMA  583,342 (43.91%) a gain of 2.48%

A 4.61% swing to Barack in LA County.

Adding it all up in CA, we get:

HILLARY CLINTON  2,175,741 (51.39%) a loss of 0.58%

BARACK OBAMA  1,822,255 (43.04%) a gain of 0.75%

A 1.33% swing to Barack statewide. I round that up and proclaim that at most, Barack could gain 1.5% in California from fixing the Double Bubble problem.

Now the biggest error I see in this analysis is that most, but not all voters vote for president. A few will pass it up, and some will legitimately mess up their ballots. So for a comparison I looked at my local San Francisco results:

Democratic votes 179,458

Non-Partisan votes 9,776

Total potential votes 189,234

Actual votes cast in Dem Primary 177,408

Percentage who voted for prez 93.75%

Doing a similar analysis for LA finds:

Democratic votes 1,139,072

Non-Partisan votes 189,438

Total potential votes 1,328,510

Actual votes cast in Dem Primary 1,197,785

Percentage who voted for prez 90.16%

My guess is that the Double Bubble effect (how fun is that to say) is somewhere in the neighborhood of the difference between SF’s 93.75% and LA’s 90.16%, which would lead to 47,693 DTS votes being disqualified by the Double Bubble. Repeating all the calculations above for 47,693 votes instead of 130,725 leads me to my final estimate: Barack Obama would probably gain 0.5% on Hillary Clinton in California if all double bubble ballots are counted. The shift in LA County would probably be 1.8%.

In table form, here is what I think counting the double bubble ballots would do to the California results:

	Current	Probable
Hillary	52.0%	51.7%
Barack	42.3%	42.6%

And to the LA County results:

	Current	Probable
Hillary	55.0%	54.2%
Barack	41.4%	42.4%

That’s my ballpark guestimate. Fire away in the comments if you think I’m wildly off base. Someone with more time and knowledge than I have might be able to extrapolate possible implications on delegate count, but my bottom line is this: it looks like the Double Bubble isn’t a massive scandal. But our election results should be sacred, and these sorts of election flaws need to be taken seriously and corrected.