The place where I voted, Coplin Plantation, has a population of 127 homo sapiens and about the same number of moose, deer, black bears and the occasional wandering wolf from Canada. The Tuesday presidential vote was thus:

George W. Bush, 37.

Al Gore, 35.

Ralph Nadir, 11.

I kind of felt good the day after the election. My tiny little outpost in the Western mountains of Maine seemed a pretty accurate weather vane for the rest of the country. As far as I could tell, there was no widespread fraud, intimidation of minorities or problems with the layout of the ballot that might have prompted large numbers of confused voters to vote for Pat Buchanan. Those good feelings quickly disappeared when the media focused on that swamp known as the state of Florida.

First count, Bush wins by 1,784 votes.

Recount, Bush wins by 327 votes.

Not good enough. Officials in four heavily Democratic counties alleged that the butterfly ballot, designed and approved by local Democrats, was made so confusing that elderly Jewish voters incorrectly voted for Buchanan. Riled up by a telemarketing company hired by Democrats to remind voters they may have been befuddled, a few befuddled Democratic voters filed lawsuits against the local Democratic registrar for participating in the despicable befuddling conspiracy.

The local election boards then began putting their hands on nearly a half-million computer punch card ballots, holding them up to the light to determine if the “chad,” a bit of dangling paper around the ballot punch hole, was big enough for the sun to shine through. In midstream, this procedure was changed so local counters might better discern the intent of the voters. No hand counts were undertaken in the heavily Republican Florida counties where a larger number of hand-punch ballots were thrown out for questionable chads.

Democratic lawyers from all over America descended on Florida, like a horde of avenging locusts promising to make certain that the “will of the people” was upheld. Three of them, Severin Beliveau, Tony Buxton and Mike Gentile, are from Maine. I know those guys. Yeah, they are a little too long on the tooth to be stomping around Florida looking for voting irregularities. But their cause is just.

We up here in Maine know that Democrats have tried overturning elections before. They proved that in 1993. Democrats Ken Allen and Mike Flood broke into a State House secure room where legislative recounts were being conducted. Allen, who at the time was the top aide to then-Democratic House Speaker John Martin, conjured up 14 phony ballots, thus swinging the election his party’s way. Republicans sighed a sigh of relief when Allen and Flood were caught. They wondered if that was why the GOP lost most of the party’s legislative recounts back in the early 1990s.

The good thing is, after Florida, we probably will never have another close presidential election. Sen.-elect Hillary Clinton says the first thing she is going to do when she hits Washington is introduce legislation abolishing the Electoral College. Depending on recounts, Bush will have carried around 31 states compromising 2.5 million square miles. Gore carried 19 states totaling about 600,000 square miles. Democrats want future elections determined by a popularity vote in the bi-coastal, big-population states where the dead sometimes vote and their party can pile up huge majorities among minority voters.

Gore would be certain to ratchet up the legislative program he headed under Bill Clinton to aggressively legalize illegal aliens for welfare and voting rights. Clinton threatened to shut down the government last month when Republicans refused to grant amnesty to more than 1 million additional illegal aliens.

Finally, there’s the Democratic-led proposal to grant voting rights to America’s inmate population. There are more than a half-million jailbirds in Florida alone, nearly enough to wipe out Maine’s entire presidential vote.

In 2004, given the trend of things, I doubt most of us up here in Coplin Plantation will take the time off from hunting.

John S. Day is a columnist for the Bangor Daily News who is based in Washington, D.C. His e-mail address is zanadume@aol.com.