Total follower count is wrong?

Bumping this up with a (redacted) example of the de-sync issue I mentioned earlier. Its a bit annoying since now I have to compensate for this.
Notice how the _total count goes up but user 45896581 stays at the top of the follows list until a subsequent request (~20s later):

 {
  "_total": 259758,
  "follows": [
    {
      "created_at": "2017-06-20T21:42:19Z",
      "user": { "_id": 45896581 }
    },
    {
      "created_at": "2017-06-20T21:42:14Z",
      "user": { "_id": 129776959 }
    }
  ]
}
{
  "_total": 259760,
  "follows": [
    {
      "created_at": "2017-06-20T21:42:19Z",
      "user": { "_id": 45896581 }
    },
    {
      "created_at": "2017-06-20T21:42:14Z",
      "user": { "_id": 129776959 }
    }
  ]
}
{
  "_total": 259760,
  "follows": [
    {
      "created_at": "2017-06-20T21:44:07Z",
      "user": { "_id": 91700582 }
    },
    {
      "created_at": "2017-06-20T21:43:47Z",
      "user": { "_id": 24289235 }
    }
  ]
}