Aside from Monday’s fly-by from Ron Paul, and some Tagg Romney sightings on Friday and Saturday, Maine is again being ignored during this presidential campaign, despite high hopes that this – finally – could have been our year.

Yeah, right.

With Super Tuesday looming like rapture for delegate-hungry candidates, our measly caucuses are being crunched like Mike Gravel under their bootheels in the great stampede toward California, Georgia and 17 other states not named Maine.

Maine, a potato state, is small potatoes. The lobster state is a throwaway cull. In the grand scheme of national politics, Maine is truly and regrettably a voice in, and from, the wilderness. And why not?

Our population is small and landscape vast. Our moderate senators seem to alternately attract and infuriate their Republican colleagues. Our congressmen are far from power brokers in their party.

Any way we slice it, as Maine goesthe nation yawns.

This state doesn’t do enough to help itself, though. In this era where voter tendencies and demographics are dissected with political precision, the state’s caucuses exclude – some would say disenfranchise – the largest, most influential segment of its citizenry: unenrolled voters.

Check the numbers: Maine has about 900,000 active voters. Some 253,300 are Republican, 281,200 are Democrats, and 25,500 are Green Independents. That’s 559,500 voters, in round figures.

The remainder, some 340,000 voters, are unenrolled, the biggest voting bloc in a rural state known coast-to-coast for its wild, maverick political sensibilities. We’re the state of Jim Longley and Angus King, after all, and the stunning 1992 victories of Ross Perot and Jerry Brown.

No wonder Ron Paul made it a point to come here, and why pre-caucus pundits predicted his victory here. If there’s one state that can groom a dark horse, it’s where the way life should be.

Yet Maine law prohibits the unenrolled from participating in the presidential preferencing that started Feb. 1, with the Republican caucuses, and continues Feb. 10 with the Democratic gatherings, unless they join a political party.

This is counterintuitive for a state that so values its independent streak.

Maine should empower voters who reject party identification, instead of asking them to don an ill-fitting partisan alignment, if even for a short period of time. A devout independent state must allow its unenrolled voters a voice.

Not only would this invite the majority of Maine voters into the political process, it could raise the state’s national coinage by giving presidential candidates something here to fight for, and make our state even more unpredictable.

We imagine most unenrolled voters, if they wanted to party with a party, would have picked one.

They preferred to be unenrolled, and maintain their independence. It makes great sense for independent Maine, then, to respect this choice by inviting them to caucus, without conditions.