To be honest, I don't really know. I'm just guessing.
What you're saying makes some kind of intuitive sense, but I'm not sure if it's right because some memes have a very high amount of views (for example, this one has over 17 thousand now, and I've seen some even in the hundreds of thousands). That makes it hard to believe people have to actually click for it to count as a view. I don't see how there could be that many clicks.
About the memes that have more upvotes than views, I only ever see them in Latest. Also, they never stay that way for long. That's why I think it has to do with the view counter and upvote counter refreshing at different rates. For example, the views might update only every 15 minutes, while the upvotes are counted every minute or so (something like that). That would explain why sometimes the views lag behind. But like I said, I don't really know. :)