It would be absurd to believe some randome Ron Paul supporter.
If the results were incorrect, the precinct captain for any of the major nominees would have noted that. Santorum’s guy certainly would have noted the error. For most precincts, multiple candidates had representatives at the vote, and all of them (except Romney’s of course in this case) would be keen to ensure that a misreport didn’t happen.
If it is a transcription error in the preliminary results of course, then when they do the official count it will get cleaned up. That is possible, although again I would have expected each campaign to compare the results reported by their precinct captains with the results being published.
More interestingly, is this guy saying that someone else lost 20 votes, or is he saying that the totals reported were 20 more than the number of people actually there? The 2nd should have been rather obvious to multiple precinct captains, especially since each precinct has an idea of who “won” their precinct, and this error would have changed the order of finish for that precinct.
So, while i don’t completely dismiss this, it is much more likely that the guy was writing down numbers and messed up, writing 2 in place of 22, than it is that the people in charge wrote 22 instead of 2 and nobody caught the error.
In addition, there are no official results yet. They are going through everything. So it is quite possible that there could be multiple errors like this found. At this point, so far as I can tell, there have been two reports of errors in reporting.
Rick Santorum has personally said that he knows of those two errors, one of which is this report, and that the results would end up making Romney the winner by 9 votes instead of 8.
There is no advantage to Santorum at this point in a focus on the vote counts. He knows that the “2nd-place finish” was just like a win for him, and any focus on 10 votes here or there will just detract from what is coming next.