Now the bad. It turns out the results on Saturday may have been even more tainted than the original critics presumed. The party has admitted that some results were missing because they were caught in email spam filters, and there were other counting errors in jurisdictions across the state. Webster said Friday that a recount had not changed Romney's win, although the new vote total hasn't been released yet.

That leaves the Washington County caucus to settle things. Skeptics say a Paul surge that sways the result is unlikely: in the original tally, he trailed Romney by 194 votes, more than the total number of ballots cast for all the candidates in the county four years ago. The Paul campaign was expected to lead a concerted effort to get its supporters out Saturday, but details on how they'll do it and what they expect have been hard to come by. Calls and emails to the Paul campaign's Maine and national headquarters were not returned Friday.

Why all this fuss over a few hundred votes and 24 delegates of the 2,286 total? It's all about momentum. Paul is still searching for his first primary or caucus win of the campaign. For Romney, meanwhile, it would be an embarrassing reversal. His proclaimed victory last Saturday came on the heels of three losses earlier that week, and gave the impression that he had stanched the bleeding. If Paul were to win, however, it would mark the second time this year that Romney has been declared the winner of a caucus only to see his victory revoked, and a rerun of the Iowa debacle that helped upend Romney's campaign narrative.

Image: Reuters