When New York search company PeekYou happened to start crunching the numbers on GOP candidates' Twitter followers last month, they encountered a number so odd that they thought they must have done the math wrong.

The startup uses an algorithm to determine how many of your followers are consumers, i.e. actual identifiable human beings, as opposed to spam accounts, business accounts and private accounts. (The company is so maniacal about making sure it has correctly identified spambots, it bought access to thousands of them on eBay.)

When it came to the GOP field, what stood out was the percentage of verifiable humans that follow Newt Gingrich: just 8% of the total.

"At first, we actually thought it might have been a bug," says Michael Hussey, PeekYou's CEO and founder. "We have seen some pretty low consumer ratios in our testing, but Newt’s was the lowest we had ever seen."

Then on Monday, an anonymous ex-Gingrich campaign staffer told Gawker that his former boss had been paying for Twitter followers. As dubious as the sourcing was, it made perfect sense to Hussey and his team. Perhaps, they thought, this wasn't a bug on their side after all.

The Gingrich campaign's response to the Gawker story was to point out that Gingrich's account had been on the Suggested Users List. This was put together by Twitter between 2009 and 2010, when the service was growing exponentially. Accounts on the list — including @Mashable — did gain a large number of followers.

Hussey does have some comfort for Gingrich on that score. "It's true that people who were on that list do tend to have less identifiable audiences," he says. "But 8% is still unusually low" — the lowest he's ever seen by five percentage points.

We've asked PeekYou to crunch the numbers for other politicians who were on the Suggested Users List, such as California's former governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and its current Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom (who has almost exactly the same number of followers as Newt). In the meantime, here's the list of GOP candidates they compiled.

Note that even if you reduce Gingrich's Twitter followers to its 106,067 verifiable humans, he's still in a very strong position compared to his rivals. Only Sarah Palin has more.

Photo credit: Flickr user Gage Skidmore