Delegates and Superdelegates in the Democrat Party

During the primaries, voters vote for delegates, who then directly elect the Presidential Candidate in July at the party convention.

It sounds sort of simple, except sometimes the delegate vote is non binding (ie, can be ignored by the party, and the delegates can vote for whomever they please once they get to the convention), and sometimes it is binding, but it depends on state laws and other things.

Superdelegates (soft delegates) are Democratic Party leaders who are free to support any candidate at any time up to the convention (presumably after they vote they can't change their mind). These are members of the senate, the house of reps, state governors, members of the Democratic National Committee etc. The final count of superdelegates is not known until the convention, because it depends on deaths, people quitting, people being voted out of office etc in the interim.

Hard delegates (pledged delegates) are awarded to each state by a formula that takes into account the proportion of votes the Democratic nominee got in the last three election cycles, and the number of electoral votes each state has in the US Electoral College. There are 4,051 of these this year. Which, I have been told, means that states that vote more democrat get more delegates, and therefore more say in who gets through to the Presidential Election.

It all seems to add up to not really knowing the result until that party convention.