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I must not be explaining my question in the right way. I know the official VOTE of the delegates takes place at the convention, but until then it has been stated over and over that once McCain reaches 1191 delegates, he will “officially” be the nominee. I would simply like to know which list the RNC (or maybe the media since they are running this campaign) are going by to determine that McCain has reached that point.

Case in point, since the last primary no other races have taken place but magically McCain has picked up about 100 or so delegates. The difference between the NYT count (which only counts PLEDGED delegates) and the AP (which has taken a survery of likely delegates) is 168 delegates. That is quite a difference...

If nothing is official until the convention, then there is no reason for Huckabee, Romney or Paul to drop out completely.

Huckabee has consistently said he will concede the race once 1191 pledged delegates are won. Going by the AP count that won’t be long, but going by NYT’s it may be a while.

Does that make it clear?

Thanks!

That's just it: there is no official delegate count. The RNC isn't going to officially count them until the convention.

State parties select delegates, so you can get official lists of delegate names and information about to whom they are pledged from individual state parties. You can then count up the numbers. That's what the news agencies do.

There are discrepancies for two reasons:

First, very often delegates aren't selected immediately after primaries or caucuses, so the news agencies come up with estimates of how many delegates a candidate will get. Some of those estimates can be different. However, eventually state parties will officially select their delegates, and you can get those delegates from the state party.

Second, as you noted, some delegates are "superdelegates" and aren't pledged to any candidate. No one knows for sure how they will vote. The only way to get a sense is to survey them, just as AP did. The RNC does no surveys until the convention, so there can't be any official count of superdelegates for any candidate.

Nevertheless, it's not going to matter. McCain will have enough pledged delegates by the end of May to make his nomination totally certain, as opposed to virtually certain as it is right now. There will be no official count before the convention, but it will be obvious to anyone who bothers to do it for himself.

Here are the official RNC rules as to delegate selection and delegate seating at the convetion:

http://www.thegreenpapers.com/P08/R.phtml

You'll note that according to the rules, state parites don't have to select their delegates until 35 days before the election, so for some states there will be no official delegate list until August.

So it looks like we'll have to rely on delegate estimates until then with no official list.

I looked at Green Papers, and I noticed they actually ahve a pretty good summary of the whole Byzantine delegate selection mess on their website. It does a good job explaining how uncertain the whole process is.

Neverthless, it's pretty easy to see that short of him keeling over and dying, or a miraculous surge for Huckabee, McCain will be the nominee. Regarless of whether he has 900 or 1000 delegates right now, it's a lead that's virtually impossible for anyone at this point to overcome.