By Blake Neff – The hotly contested GOP nomination has brought increased attention to the intricacies of primary and caucus rules. While many people are aware of winner-take-all and proportional delegate states, the way Republicans allocate delegates has many bizarre quirks that have largely escaped notice, which could have major consequences in a close election season that could end with a contested convention.

Here's six of the weirdest quirks about the Republican nomination process, discovered with the help of The Green Papers, an extremely detailed database of primary election information created by Richard Berg-Andersson.

1. The GOP's rules heavily reward small Republican-controlled states.

Much like the Electoral College itself, the Republican primary process allocates delegates by states, but not in proportion to population. The largest state, California, has 172 delegates, but every state also has a minimum of 16 delegates, meaning the largest state only has about 10 times the delegates of the smallest state, even though California is over 40 times the size of several small states like Wyoming, Vermont and Delaware.

The skew can be even greater because states can receive a fixed number of bonus delegates for electing Republicans to various offices. Having a Republican governor is worth one extra delegate, as is each Republican senator, and having a majority-Republican house delegation. States also get a bonus delegate if one of their state legislative houses is Republican-controlled, and a second bonus delegate if all state legislative houses are Republican-controlled. Since these six bonus delegates are fixed regardless of a state's size, they boost the relative importance of small states far more than they increase the relevance of large ones.

2. Electoral votes matter, but in an odd way.

In addition to rewarding states that have Republican officeholders, the Republican National Committee also rewards states that voted Republican in the most recent presidential election. But once again, the reward is calculated in an odd way that heavily favors smaller states.

Instead of giving states a delegate boost equal to their electoral vote total, states that voted Republican in 2012 are rewarded a bonus delegate count based on the following formula: 4.5 + (0.6 x [2012 electoral vote total]).

So, for example, Indiana voted Republican in 2012 and had 11 electoral votes, so it receives a bonus of 12 delegates, since 4.5 + (11 x 0.6) = 11.1 (all fractions round up).

This mathematical formula heavily favors small states over large ones. States with only three electoral votes receive a bonus of seven delegates, more than twice their electoral vote count, while Texas's 38 electoral votes produce just 28 bonus delegates.

The two different sets of bonuses, for elected officials and electoral votes, have the effect of giving small but heavily Republican states a tremendous degree of power compared to large but Democratic ones. Wyoming, for instance, voted Republican in 2012 and is dominated by Republicans at both the state and federal level. Since it received every bonus delegate possible, the state has 29 delegates to the Republican convention. California, the country's largest state but one that received no bonus delegates, has 172 delegates. In other words, California has only about six times as many delegates as Wyoming, even though California is 70 times the size of Wyoming. Wyoming actually has more delegates than Oregon, a state with seven times as many people.

3. Tiny U.S. territories are ridiculously overrepresented.