By Rosie Gray | Buzz Feed | Mar. 12, 2012

Ron Paul is finally indulging in the kind of speculation usually reserved for his supporters: is he, dead last in delegates but with the most devoted fans, a victim of election fraud?

"A lot of our supporters are very suspicious about it," he told reporters in Missouri this weekend. "The straw votes are very confusing. You probably read the paper about what happened up in Maine. There's just a lot of confusion. They said let's just have a recount, we said we can't have a recount, they just write these numbers down on pieces of paper and throw them away afterwards. And that's the kind of stuff that makes you suspicious because quite frankly, I don't think the other candidates get a crowd like this and we get them constantly, thousands of people coming out, and you would get the perception that we would get a lot more votes. But we're gonna get the delegates and the delegate hunt is on. And that is a lot more difficult to get careless with the numbers because each individual knows what their responsibility is and they work through the caucus system and so far we're getting good news on that."

One reason for the jarring gap between Paul's big crowds and his small number of delegates: there are some cases where, due to arcane caucus rules, Paul has won the most votes but not the most delegates It's places like that that underline the weakness in Paul's caucus strategy while fueling his supporters' penchant for conspiracy theories.