I see a lot of red and blue on electoral maps. Gold? Not so often. And yet that’s exactly what you see in the middle of Maine on the Atlas town map of the 2012 presidential election.

It turns out that a small Maine town unanimously voted for a write-in candidate. That’s weird enough. Even more mysterious: the town appears out of nowhere.

A look at the results on the Maine Board of Elections website reveals that there was no error, at least not on the part of the US Election Atlas. The official results also show that the town—Concord, nestled in Maine’s sparsely populated hinterlands—cast three write-in ballots for Ron Paul, who was a registered write-in candidate in Maine. But Concord doesn’t appear in Maine’s election results for 2008, or any of the recent elections I looked at.

When you conduct a simple Google search, it’s clear something’s off. The Wikipedia entry is basically empty (although it has been updated recently enough to include Ron Paul’s victory). The town doesn’t have a website. The first descriptive Google hit says the town’s population was 406… in 1880. The next article says it produced 3,121 bushels of wheat… in 1837. Finally, the news: Concord is an extinct town, and has been since 1939.