(Credit: Reuters)

If the United States and all the other countries of the world were to line up by voter participation rate, we would find ourselves ranked lower than war-torn countries like Sierra Leone, massive countries like Indonesia, and baby democracies like East Timor.

Despite our status as the world’s oldest democracy, just over half (53.6 percent) of voting-age Americans cast a ballot in 2012. In fact, of 169 countries ranked by turnout level, the U.S. has the ignominious honor of taking 120th place.

There are plenty of reasons for our fledgling turnout rate. We hold elections more frequently than most countries. Many voters find it hard to take time off during a Tuesday in early November to vote. An increasing number of states have passed new laws designed to inhibit certain people from casting a ballot. The list goes on.

Other countries have been able to achieve far higher levels of participation with the help of various initiatives designed to encourage citizens to vote. Some, particularly compulsory voting, may be right for the United States and others may not, but it is instructive to consider how other countries have structured their elections to make them as accessible as possible.

Here are a number of these reforms, in no particular order:

1. Automatically registering everyone to vote. Some countries like France (71.2 percent turnout) and Sweden (82.6 percent turnout) automatically register their citizens to vote, removing a major hurdle in the electoral process. France automatically registers citizens when they turn 18, while Sweden and other Scandinavian countries use tax registration rolls to produce voter lists.

2. Weekend voting. Many countries including Australia (81.0 percent turnout), Greece (69.4 percent turnout), and Brazil (80.6 percent turnout) put Election Day on the weekend. This helps ensure that as many people as possible can participate and won’t be prevented by work requirements.

3. Nationwide Election Day registration. Canada (53.8 percent turnout), for example, allows citizens who haven’t registered to do so when they get to the polls on Election Day, rather than barring them from participating.

4. Lower voting age. Not all nations set the voting age at 18. Many like Brazil (80.6 percent turnout), Nicaragua (71.8 percent turnout), and Austria (75.6 percent turnout) allow 16-year-olds to vote.

5. Compulsory voting. Dozens of countries, ranging from Uruguay (96.1 percent turnout) to the Dominican Republic (70.2 percent turnout) to Singapore (55.3 percent turnout), require citizens to vote. Some of the countries actually enforce the requirement, usually with a small fine for people who don’t cast a ballot; $20 in Australia for those without a good excuse, for instance. Other countries either don’t have penalties for non-voters or don’t enforce penalties on the books.

6. Online voting. A few countries have started to dip their toes into the online voting water. Most notably, Estonia (55.5 percent turnout) has been allowing its citizens to cast a ballot online since 2005. In 2011, a quarter of all Estonians utilized the option. They have yet to face major security breaches in the system.

7. Fewer elections. Elections are often unsynchronized in the United States, with local elections taking place on different dates than federal elections, to say nothing of primaries, recalls, and the like. Many other countries hold all their elections on a single day, in part to avoid voter fatigue.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder

Attorney General Eric Holder told reporters on Tuesday that he recused himself early on in the Department of Justice’s investigation of the Associated Press and possible national security leaks.

Holder was speaking at what was meant to be a Health and Human Services announcement of stricter rules on going after Medicare fraud. Instead, Holder found himself answering a slew of questions related to the DOJ’s subpoena of multiple phone records belonging to the AP. In sum, twenty phone lines were pulled, including the home phone numbers of several reporters. Asked about his role in the matter, Holder told the assembled crowd that he had recused himself early on “to avoid a potential conflict of interest” as the FBI had previously interviewed him in relation to the case.

Holder also identified Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole as the Justice Department official who originally signed off on the subpoena of AP’s phone records, in conjunction with the U.S. Attorney in Washington, DC. Holder referred several questions about the investigation to a letter the Deputy Attorney General sent to AP in response to the scathing letter the wire agency released yesterday. In the letter, Cole sought to reassure the AP that their records “have not and will not be provided for use in any other investigations.” However, the Justice Department will not return the records to the AP as requested.

The Attorney General insisted that he was a strong advocate of protecting the First Amendment rights of the press, saying that sweeping, overbroad subpoenas are not a matter of administration policy:

HOLDER: That is certainly not the policy of this administration. If you will remember in 2009 when I was — my confirmation hearings, I testified in favor of a reporter shield law. We as an administration took a position in favor of such a law. It didn’t get the necessary support up on the Hill. It’s something this administration still thinks would be appropriate. We have investigated cases on the basis of the facts. Not as a result of a policy to get the press or to do anything of that nature. The facts and the law have dictated our actions in that regard.

While refusing to say exactly what was leaked to prompt the investigation into the AP, Holder lent credence to the idea that it was national security related, calling the subject matter a “very, very serious leak.” The lead “put the American people at risk,” Holder said. “That is not hyperbole. It put the American people at risk.” The Associated Press in 2009 published a story on a foiled terrorist plot in Yemen, which gave details related to a double agent planted among Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and is likely the cause of the investigation.

“I’m proud of what we have done,” Holder said of the administration’s civil rights policies on the whole. “We have been, I think, very aggressive in our enforcement of the civil rights laws.” Despite that pride, the administration has been forced to confront a slew of troubling civil liberties issues in the recent weeks, including the use of actions deemed torture at Guantanamo Bay, the ongoing targeted killing program, the IRS possibly improperly targeting conservative groups, and now the possible curtailing of the free press.

The Internal Revenue Service is under fire from both parties for improperly targeting certain groups for additional scrutiny because their names included keywords such as “Tea Party” and “patriot.” But the challenge of addressing the skyrocketing numbers of “social welfare” groups registering for tax exempt status could be lessened by fixing the broken disclosure laws for political advertisers.

Since the Supreme Court’s controversial 5 to 4 ruling in the Citizens United v. FEC case in 2010, the IRS has seen a more than 100 percent increase in the number of groups applying for 501(c)(4) status — the section of the federal tax code that governs non-profit groups dedicated to social welfare — from 1,500 in 2010 to 3,400 in 2012.

Not all 501(c)(4) engage in political activity of any kind — the United States Chess Federation, for example, is a fairly apolitical group. Political 501(c)(4) groups are required to adhere to certain rules, including that they not be “primarily engaged” in electioneering activity. In a failed attempt to sort out which groups were apolitical and which needed additional scrutiny, the IRS reportedly tried a variety of ineffective screening methods, including flagging “patriot” groups as well as groups that focused on making “America a better place to live.”

As long as it is not their primary purpose, Citizens United allows (c)(4) groups to spend unlimited funds on “independent expenditure” ads aimed at swaying voters and the deadlocked Federal Election Commission allows these groups to avoid any disclosure of who bankrolls these advertisements. And since the 2002 law governing political advertisements came before the ruling, it does not adequately address the specific issue of disclosure for independent expenditure ads.

Because of this loophole, groups seeking to influence elections through campaign ads groups and to avoid having to make their donors public have often registered as (c)(4)s, rather than as super PACs (tax-exempt groups which can also raise and spend unlimited amounts on “independent expenditures,” but must make public all large donors). After bankrolling super PACs in the 2012 elections, mega-donors including millionaire investor Foster Friess and billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson have vowed to keep future political spending secret, by giving to opaque 501(c)(4) committees instead. And good government groups have demanded the IRS investigate whether (c)(4)s like Crossroads GPS, the Commission on Growth, Hope and Opportunity, and the American Future Fund are really just super PACs in disguise.

The guidelines for what is and is not an acceptable level of political activity for a (c)(4) has never been clear — a vague “primary purpose” test — and has been little enforced. With limited staff and resources, even before massive furloughs forced by the sequester, the IRS has proved ill-equipped to monitor which (c)(4)s are really (c)(4)s and which ones are pretenders.

Congressional Republicans have thus far blocked efforts to require disclosure of political ad spending by (c)(4) groups. The proposed DISCLOSE Act and the Follow the Money Act would help bring parity to the disclosure rules goverrning independent campaign ads, without impeding on the legitimate activity of (c)(4)s. But if groups like Crossroads GPS were required to disclose the major donors behind their $70 million-plus campaign ad spending, there would be little incentive for them to masquerade as social welfare groups.

If Congress simply treated all spending on independent campaign advertisements uniformly — allowing voters to know who was really speaking and to evaluate the speech accordingly — the IRS would not have to use these clearly imperfect tests to decide what is and isn’t a legitimate 501(c)(4).

Note: ThinkProgress is a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund (CAPAF), which has been recognized by the IRS as a 501(c)(4) organization. CAPAF does not endorse candidates, nor does it fund “independent expenditures” or any other kind of candidate-related advertising.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) told reporters Tuesday that the IRS is not the agency best equipped to oversee political groups. “DISCLOSE would have taken the IRS out of the business of investigating these groups.” He noted that “not a single Republican voted for” the measure in the Senate, asking “where was the outrage from the Republicans then?” House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi made similar arguments Monday. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told reporters Tuesday that he continues to oppose the DISCLOSE Act, inaccurately claiming it was “designed to give the IRS even more power, directly, to silence the critics of this administration.”

Former RNC Florida Hispanic Outreach Director Pablo Pantoja. Credit: Tampa Bay Times

When Republicans appointed Pablo Pantoja to State Director of Florida Hispanic Outreach for the Republican National Committee, they hoped he would be able to bridge the sizable gap that only expanded during the 2012 elections, when the state’s 4.3 million Hispanic voters supported Barack Obama over Mitt Romney by a 20 percent margin.

But after months of inaction by Congressional Republicans on comprehensive immigration reform and stiff resistance by Republican-leaning groups like the Heritage Foundation, Pantoja has had enough; on Monday, he announced via email that he was leaving the party and registering as a Democrat:

Friend,

Yes, I have changed my political affiliation to the Democratic Party.

It doesn’t take much to see the culture of intolerance surrounding the Republican Party today. I have wondered before about the seemingly harsh undertones about immigrants and others. Look no further; a well-known organization recently confirms the intolerance of that which seems different or strange to them.

Pantoja goes on to specifically cite last week’s revelation — that an author of Heritage’s false report on the cost of the Gang of Eight’s immigration bill wrote a dissertation in which he suggested that Hispanics are at a permanent disadvantage because they have lower IQs — as the final straw in his political evolution.

Prior to assuming the role of state director, Pantoja served in the National Guard, doing multiple tours abroad in Kuwait and Iraq before returning to the states and getting involved in Republican politics. In 2010 he served as a field director in Florida during the midterm elections.

Republicans have for months tried to find ways to make inroads with the country’s growing hispanic population, especially in the swing state of Florida. Hispanics there turned out to vote at a rate of more than 62 percent in 2012, significantly higher than the national turnout rate of 48 percent and the highest rate of Hispanic turnout in the country.