When it comes to handicapping a federal leadership race in the one-member-one-vote era, membership sales figures — specifically, how many memberships each candidate claims to have sold — matter a lot.

But it looks like journalists keeping tabs on the New Democratic Party leadership contest are going to have to live with the suspense until at least one round of ballots has been counted. No one — not party officials, not the four candidates themselves — seems to be ready (or, in the case of the party, able) to publicly release that information.

The party says it will reveal the final tally of eligible voters just as soon as it has finished processing the paperwork, which likely will be early next week. But it seems that figure will be the total number of names on the official voting list — with no detailed breakdown of memberships sold by individual candidates.

In fact, as the federal New Democrats extend full voting rights to paid-up members of its various provincial wings, that number won’t even necessarily tell us how many joined — or rejoined — the national party specifically to vote for the next leader, which could give some hint of how much interest the race is generating outside existing party circles.

iPolitics also reached out to all four candidates to see if they would share the number of memberships sold by their respective teams. As yet, none have been willing to do so.

“We are not releasing any numbers publicly, just like in a regular election, where we wouldn’t release marks,” a member of Niki Ashton’s media team told iPolitics via email.

That Ashton staffer did, however, offer a few demographic tidbits: “About 70 per cent” of the people Ashton signed up were “brand new members to the party,” 75 per cent of the signups were people under age 40, and while there were, “as expected, … a large number of folks coming from the Prairies and the North,” one-fifth of her sign-ups came from Quebec.

A spokesperson for Jagmeet Singh noted that the Toronto-area candidate, who currently represents Brampton in the Ontario legislature, has “signed up thousands and thousands of members across the country,” but declined to provide any additional data.

As for the other two candidates, a spokesperson for Guy Caron’s campaign confirmed that they would not be publicly releasing membership sales numbers, while Charlie Angus’s campaign has not yet responded to our query.

Unlike the case of the recent Conservative leadership contest, no candidate running to lead the NDP seems likely to emerge as an early favourite (although as Maxime Bernier’s people will tell you, frontrunner status isn’t all it’s cracked up to be).

If the New Democrat race goes to more than one ballot — if no one candidate manages to win more than 50 per cent in the opening round — it will become very tricky to predict. Online voters will be free to change their rankings during the one-week break between votes — even if their initial first-choice pick is still in contention.

In 2012, just over 65,000 members cast an opening ballot in the race that ultimately selected Mulcair, although that number may have been artificially deflated due to technical issues with the online voting system.