Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum will announce he will suspend his campaign on Tuesday at an event in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, a senior adviser to the campaign tells CNN.

And with that, I’m suspending coverage of the Republican nomination race until the convention. While Mitt Romney is still 530 delegates short of the nomination, neither Santorum nor Newt Gingrich are in any position to stop Romney from steamrolling over the remaining states and win on the first ballot. The tally at this time:

(Turns out the West Virginia party chair from yesterday announced his resignation last week, so Romney gets rolled back to 614.)

Most importantly, the nomination battle lasted until the start of baseball season. Go Giants!

Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who is considered one of the front runners in the 2012 Republican presidential primary, is the “right person” for the job, West Virginia Republican Party Chairman Mike Stuart said April 9.

At 8:00 Central Time, polls close in Wisconsin, which allocates its 42 delegates tonight. The allocation is easy—18 delegates to the statewide winner, plus 3 delegates for each Congressional district won, as follows:

I put Wisconsin first, out of poll-closing-time order, because it’s really the only state where Santorum has a chance of doing decently. Polls in both Maryland and the District of Columbia are now closed. The 16 pledged delegates from the District of Columbia are allocated to the winner of tonight’s primary. That winner is Mitt Romney. Maryland’s 37 delegates are allocated similarly to Wisconsin’s, except the statewide winner only gets 13 at-large delegates.

BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — Supporters of Republican presidential candidates Ron Paul and Rick Santorum protested the North Dakota GOP’s process for choosing national convention delegates on Saturday, with a former state party chairman calling it a “railroad job.”

The two candidates’ backers claimed a suggested slate of 25 national convention delegates was stacked with fans of Mitt Romney, who finished behind Paul and Santorum during North Dakota’s March 6 presidential preference caucuses.

Numerically?

#NDGOP national delegate slate gives Paul 2, Santorum 6, Romney 20.Delegates voting now. Actual results coming.

— Luke Hellier (@lukehellier) March 31, 2012

Contrast with the caucus-based projection: Santorum 11, Paul 8, Romney 7, Gingrich 2. Romney gains 13 delegates.

In other delegate news, the Minnesota 7th Congressional District convention was held this weekend, and selects its three delegates to the national convention:

@FHQ Santorum also lost a “projected” delegate to Ron Paul in the MN-07 CD Convention. Santorum ended up with 2 Delegates, Paul 1. #mngop

— Minnesota Mike (@MinnesotaMike1) April 1, 2012

As I, unlike the AP, didn’t project any delegates based on the earlier Minnesota caucus results, all three of these are new delegates in my count.

The remaining Congressional district delegates will be selected over the next three weeks.

Romney for President today announced that former Jon Huntsman delegate Paul Collins and former Huntsman alternate delegate Brad Blais will support Mitt Romney.

So this means a delegate gets moved from the Huntsman column to the Romney column, right? Unfortunately, it’s a bit more complicated than that. See, the New Hampshire allocation is based on the state losing half of its delegates due to RNC sanctions for having an early primary. And the list of delegates provided by the New Hampshire Secretary of State gives a delegate slate that does not reflect those sanctions. Meaning that there are 3 delegates listed for Huntsman, when only 2 will be able to vote at the convention.

(Looking to the 2008 convention, when New Hampshire was similarly sanctioned, doesn’t help. The state actually announced 24 votes for McCain from the convention floor, even though only 12 were counted by the Chair.)

In the spirit of not being helpful to the delegate count, we have this from the Manchester Union Leader:

Huntsman’s other two New Hampshire delegates, consultant Sarah Crawford Stewart and business executive Renee Plummer, told the Status this morning they remain uncommitted. Plummer said she intends to remain uncommitted until the Republican National Convention in late summer.

In the spirit of trying to make some kind of sense out of all of this, here’s what I’m going to do with the two Huntsman delegates:

• The Union Leader claims that Huntsman’s “delegates were released when he dropped out”, but Huntsman’s 16 January statement was that he was suspending his campaign—not formally withdrawing. As such, I think this assertion is dubious. However, it is likely that if Huntsman has not yet released his delegates, he will do so prior to the convention. Huntsman supports Romney, and holding his delegates only hinders Romney from getting to 1144 delegates. Therefore, the two delegates now recorded as pledged to Huntsman will be considered unpledged. The Huntsman column will be removed from the delegate board.
• There are no indications that the Republican Party is likely to restore New Hampshire to 24 delegates. They didn’t do so in 2008, and that convention wasn’t at all contentious. Therefore, I’m not going to adopt the alternative count that conforms with the New Hampshire Secretary of State’s list.
• The delegate preferences of the three Huntsman delegates appears to be: Romney 1, Uncommitted 2. Given both the New Hampshire delegation’s overall lean and Huntsman’s endorsement of Romney, I’m inclined to predict that the rest of the Huntsman delegates are more likely to break to Romney than to any other candidate. So I’m going to give the benefit of the doubt to Collins’s seating and declare the current breakdown to be: Romney 1, Uncommitted 1.
• If, later in the primary process, it appears that the result of the first ballot is seriously in doubt, I’ll be prepared to actually contact the Republican National Committee, or the New Hampshire Republican Party, and seek clarification about the composition of the New Hampshire delegate slate.

So yeah, this has been a really long-winded way of allocating Romney Delegate No. 515.

Meanwhile, polls have now closed in Louisiana. Louisiana has 46 delegates, of which 3 are RNC members and 23 will be named at the state convention in June. That leaves 20 delegates who will be allocated based on the results of tonight’s primary. There’s a 25% threshold for receiving delegates. The tally:

UPDATE [22:19 CDT]: We’re probably done for the night. 4 of the remaining 5 delegates will be officially “Uncommitted”, and we won’t have a chance to see who they prefer until they’re actually named in June. The fifth delegate will probably also be “Uncommitted”, but there’s a chance it could become Romney’s sixth delegate instead.

No word yet on who, if anybody, Alaska’s three RNC member delegates are supporting.

The Illinois Republican Party State Convention will select 12 additional delegates to the convention in mid-June.

UPDATE [19:00 CDT]: In non-Illinois news, Carlos Méndez, Puerto Rico Republican Party chair, has switched his endorsement from Gingrich to Romney. This means that Romney has the support of all 23 Puerto Rico delegates.

UPDATE [23:21 CDT]: This might be all the delegates I’m going to be able allocate tonight. All precincts are reporting in CD 18, and a Santorum delegate is leading the final Gingrich delegate by 109 votes. In CD 16, 3 precincts are outstanding, and a number of delegates are within a thousand votes of each other. I might be able to allocate the final two CD 16 delegates when those last few precincts come in, but there’s no guarantee.

UPDATE [16:56 MST]:Fun!

PLEASE NOTE: PARK COUNTY RESULTS ARE NOW IN CONTESTED MODE AND ARE NOT CONSIDERED FINAL, BUT PENDING.

That’s a Santorum delegate at the moment; the caucus vote in Park County was reported as Santorum 29-27 Romney.

Well, the Park County Republican Executive Committee voted last night to award the delegate in question to Romney. So the revised Wyoming delegate count to date: Romney 9, Santorum 2, Paul 1, with 17 “unallocated”.

And while we’re on the subject of challenged delegates, apparently the Santorum campaign intends to pursue a credentials challenge against the Arizona and Florida delegations for being winner-take-all in violation of Republican party rules. Presently, Romney will get all 79 delegates from those states. The Santorum challenge would allocate those state delegates as follows:

In total, this challenge would remove 42 delegates from the Romney column if successful.

I still think Romney gets the nomination on the first ballot, and I suspect tonight’s Illinois results will help solidify those expectations. But this year’s convention could still be quite entertaining.

 Romney will top 50 percent and win all 20 of the island’s delegates to the Republican presidential nominating convention in August.

And Santorum looks silly for campaigning there.