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.

After a year in which voting lines proved to be a much bigger problem than alleged voter fraud, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R) is gaining traction for his proposal to give himself more power to prosecute such cases. The power to investigate and charge individuals in cases of alleged election fraud now rests with local criminal prosecutors. But under a bill that has now passed in different forms in both houses of the state legislature, that power would be moved to Kobach’s office. The Associated Press reports:

The secretary of state is Kansas’ chief elections official but must refer cases of potential election irregularities to county and federal prosecutors if criminal charges are to be pursued. Even the state attorney general’s office must consult with local prosecutors on such cases.

Kobach said county prosecutors have too many other criminal cases to handle to pursue election fraud allegations aggressively, and the attorney general’s office also has “a very full plate.” He said the secretary of state’s office is most likely to pursue election fraud allegations aggressively and develop expertise in investigating them. [...]

Rep. Jan Pauls, a Hutchinson Democrat, said if legislators want a state official to have the specific authority to prosecute election fraud cases, it should go to the attorney general’s office.

“The AG should be in control of all the prosecutions, or the local district and county attorneys,” she said. “It’s nice to have everybody’s role stay the same as it has been traditionally.”

Kobach’s critics also contend that he’s overstated the potential for election abuses both in pushing for expanded authority for his office and successfully pursuing the photo ID and proof-of-citizenship laws in Kansas. Election fraud prosecutions have been relatively few over the past decade, and the state has about 1.7 million registered voters.

But Kobach argues that Kansas appears to have few cases because election irregularities aren’t pursued aggressively. He said his office has found at least 30 cases from the 2012 election in which the name and birthdate of someone who voted in Kansas matched the name and birthdate of someone who voted in another state, suggesting illegal, double voting.

Nationwide, voter fraud is an exceedingly rare occurrence, and Americans are more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit voter fraud. When Kobach ran on a platform to fight voter fraud in 2010, investigations found that Kobach’s claims were vastly overstated. Over the course of a five-year period, there had only been seven cases of alleged voter fraud at the local, state, and federal law, and just one of those incidents had been prosecuted. When Kobach floated this bill to assume prosecutorial power last year, a Democratic state representative who questioned Kobach’s slate of potential voter fraud cases found that most of them concerned snow birds who live half the year in Kansas and half elsewhere and may end up registering in two places with no ill intent. ”I can’t wait for him to drag some snowbird off to jail,” Rep. Ann Mah said. Nonetheless, Kobach has continued to tout strict voter ID laws and greater state resources pumped into combating this alleged problem.

Moving prosecutions to Kobach’s office could lead to politicized criminal charges. A former advisor to Mitt Romney, Kobach been a leader in the anti-immigrant movement, and is known for having helped to draft Arizona’s controversial and partially invalidated immigration law, SB 1070, and as a top proponent of strict voter ID laws that disproportionately disfranchise minorities. Kobach was previously counsel for the Immigration Reform Law Institute, the legal arm of an organization labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. This year, with more conservative Republicans replacing moderates in the state legislature, the bill seems poised to pass if the houses can reconcile the two versions, as expected, and gain Gov. Sam Brownback’s (R) signature.

Both houses of the Colorado legislature passed a major overhaul of state election law that would implement same-day registration and voting, automatically send mail-in ballots to every voter, and create a real-time statewide voter database to prevent fraud. Proponents view the bill, written by a bipartisan group of county clerks, as a national model for other states.

The same-day registration provision prompted most of the resistance from Republicans, who largely voted against the bill in both houses. The bill, however, did garner Republican support from county clerks, and former Republican Secretary of State Donetta Davidson. The Denver Post explained:

Those promoting the changes said the bill is uniquely Colorado, and the state could take the lead nationally on making elections more convenient to voters. They are confident other states will follow — because voters like mail voting (74 percent in Colorado last November), while preserving in-person voting at a few early voting centers, and, eventually, saving millions of dollars for counties. [...]

Other clerks, though, said switching to mail will mean buying less equipment to operate and maintain for a ever-shrinking number of people who still vote in person. That could save millions of dollars in some county over a longer period of time. Denver expects to save a total of about $730,000 in next year’s general election alone, director of elections Amber McReyholds said.

Before the bill goes before Gov. John Hickenlooper (D), the Senate must approve a slight amendment to the House bill. If signed into law, the bill is likely to give a significant boost to turnout. In Washington, Colorado and Oregon, the states that now have universal vote-by-mail, turnout rates exceed the national average by at least five percentage points. And studies have found that Election Day Registration laws boost turnout 7 to 14 percentage points.

Since the November election, 195 bills to expand the franchise have been introduced in 45 states, according to a recent Brennan Center for Justice study. Thirty-one states, however, also introduced 80 new bills to roll back the right to vote.

Though Republican election officials in battleground states sought to dampen voter turn out of traditionally Democratic voters through by instituting identification requirements and limiting early voting hours, a new analysis of census data by the Associated Press shows that African Americans “voted at a higher rate than other minority groups in 2012 and by most measures surpassed the white turnout for the first time.”

The analysis finds that had “people voted last November at the same rates they did in 2004, when black turnout was below its current historic levels, Republican Mitt Romney would have won narrowly”:

The 2012 data suggest Romney was a particularly weak GOP candidate, unable to motivate white voters let alone attract significant black or Latino support. Obama’s personal appeal and the slowly improving economy helped overcome doubts and spur record levels of minority voters in a way that may not be easily replicated for Democrats soon.

Romney would have erased Obama’s nearly 5 million-vote victory margin and narrowly won the popular vote if voters had turned out as they did in 2004, according to Frey’s analysis. Then, white turnout was slightly higher and black voting lower.

More significantly, the battleground states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida and Colorado would have tipped in favor of Romney, handing him the presidency if the outcome of other states remained the same.

African Americans outperformed their voter share, representing 13 percent of total votes cast in 2012 while making up 12 percent of the population — despite facing great obstacles to exercising the franchise.

A poll conducted by Hart Research poll immediately after the election reported that 22 percent of African-Americans waited 30 minutes or more to vote, compared to just 9 percent of white voters. A more thorough analysis from Massachusetts Institute of Technology confirmed that black and hispanic voters waited nearly twice as long to vote as whites. In Florida, home to the longest lines, at least 201,000 people may have been deterred from voting by the long waits.

Black youth was also far more likely to be asked to show ID, a study by professors at the University of Chicago and Washington University in St. Louis found, and many did not even try to vote because they lacked the required identification.

“The 2008 election was the first year when the minority vote was important to electing a U.S. president. By 2024, their vote will be essential to victory,” William H. Frey, a demographer who analyzed the 2012 elections for the AP, said. “Democrats will be looking at a landslide going into 2028 if the new Hispanic voters continue to favor Democrats.”

Voter ID laws, which require voters to show photo ID in order to vote, are one of the most common forms of voter suppression laws favored by Republican state lawmakers. Although the laws’ supporters claim that they are necessary to combat in-person voter fraud, a voter is more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit fraud at the polls. According to one study, a vanishingly small 0.0002 percent of votes are the product of such fraud. Instead, the primary function of voter ID laws is to make it harder for minorities, students, low-income voters — all of which are both less likely to have ID and more likely to vote for Democrats than other voter demographics — from casting a ballot.

Earlier today, Rep. Rick Larsen (D-WA) introduced legislation to prevent this from happening. Under Larsen’s bill, voters disenfranchised by Republican voter ID laws could still vote in federal elections if they signed a sworn statement:

‘‘(1) IN GENERAL.—Except as provided in subsection (c), if a State has in effect a requirement that an individual present identification as a condition of receiving and casting a ballot in an election for Federal office, the State shall permit the individual to meet the requirement—

‘‘(A) in the case of an individual who desires to vote in person, by presenting the appropriate State or local election official with a sworn written statement, signed by the individual under penalty of perjury, attesting to the individual’s identification and attesting that the individual is registered to vote in the election; or

‘‘(B) in the case of an individual who desires to vote by mail, by submitting with the ballot the statement described in subparagraph 6 (A).

The bill does contain an exception for first-time voters that register to vote by mail, but it otherwise would free federal races from one of the most common Republican voter suppression tactics.

The Constitution gives Congress broad authority to address voter suppression. Although the Constitution permits states to set “[t]he times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representative” Congress may “at any time by law make or alter such regulations.” Additionally, because of voter ID laws’ impact on minority voter, Congress should also have the authority to abolish them altogether under its power to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment’s promise that “[t]he right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

A conservative group connected to Colorado’s Secretary of State has been sending political mailers — including a picture of a darker-skinned woman whose face was digitally removed and replaced with a white woman’s face — in an attempt to oppose a landmark voting bill that may soon become law.

Colorado is currently considering a major piece of legislation to improve the state’s voting laws by implementing Election Day Registration, automatically sending mail ballots to every voter, and creating a real-time voter database to detect and prevent fraud. It passed the House last week and will now be taken up by the Democratic-controlled Senate.

Secretary of State Scott Gessler, a frequent speaker at True The Vote events who uses his perch to warn about the supposed threat of voter fraud, is leading opposition to the bill, which is supported by a number of Republican County Clerks and the Colorado County Clerks Association.

Now, a dark money group named the “Citizens for Free and Fair Elections”, which lists its address as that of Gessler’s former firm, the Hackstaff Law Group, is sending out photoshopped mailers in an attempt to pressure the election clerks into switching their position.

Here is the mailer:

The mailer’s background was taken from the following Getty Images photo:

Except for two key differences. The original photo included a darker-skinned woman in a white hoodie sweatshirt, but the altered version in the mailer took out her face and replaced it with the exact same face of the white woman standing alongside. In addition, a dark-skinned man standing behind her in the photo was removed from the mailer entirely.

ColoradoPols, the first site to catch the photoshop job, shows the two side-by-side:

Gessler, in a statement released Sunday evening, denied involvement in the matter.

A new report from the Brennan Center for Justice details the voting rights landscape in the beginning of 2013, painting a much rosier picture for advocates of voting rights than the previous two years.

In all, 195 bills to expand voting rights have been introduced in 45 states this year (see where on the map below). Of those, three states have passed as many bills thus far: Virginia passed online voter registration, New Mexico made registration at the state’s DMVs easier, and Oklahoma loosened its voter ID law. 155 bills are still pending in 37 state legislatures, including legislation to restore ex-felons’ voting rights, implement Election Day registration, and roll back voter ID laws.

However, as the report notes, those looking to restrict access to the ballot box are still a force in dozens of states. This year, at least 80 new bills rolling back voting rights have been introduced in 31 states (refer to the map below), with 62 bills still pending in 25 states. Two states have successfully passed legislation making it harder to vote: Virginia, which has passed voter ID and legislation restricting voter registration groups like the League of Women Voters, and Arkansas, which passed voter ID over Gov. Mike Beebe’s (D) veto.

President Obama announced in his State of the Union speech this year that he would be creating a commission to improve the voting experience in the United States. The nine-member commission was created on March 28 and will address issues like long lines, voting technology, and other ballot-related matters.

Non-English speakers could soon find it more difficult to cast a ballot in Florida, despite federal protections for those citizens who speak another language.

Federal law requires voting officials to permit voters who are unable to read the ballot to be assisted by a person of their choice. In Florida, which has large swaths of non-native English speakers, this measure is critical in protecting every citizen’s voting rights. However, those protections could be tested after Republican state senators in Florida inserted language in an elections bill to prevent private interpreters from helping citizens who cannot fully understand English.

The Miami Herald has more:

The architect of the new elections bill, Sen. Jack Latvala, R-St. Petersburg, said his measure would not ban interpreters, but would limit those who use foreign-language speakers for partisan ends. . . . “What it does away with,” he said, “is the right of someone to stand outside a polling place and say: ‘I want to go in and help you because I’m here.’ It limits one person being able to do that 10 times a day.”

But that’s a major change, says Braynon and liberal-leaning election-rights groups.

If a person can provide assistance to only 10 people, then certain precincts could have required as many as 50 interpreters during the 2012 elections, Braynon said.

“We had trouble finding five people to help interpret,” he said.

The overarching problem is that for speakers of languages like Creole — like Desiline Victor, the 102-year-old Miami voter who attended the State of the Union speech — there are not enough interpreters available to help, which contributes to the state’s long lines. Private translators, particularly for less prevalent languages, can help alleviate the problem.

Republicans in Florida aren’t the only ones pushing legislation that would impede non-English speaking voters. Last month, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) and Rep. Steve King (R-IA) introduced the English Language Unity Act, which could hinder the printing of non-English ballots as the Voting Rights Act currently requires.

At a social conservatives’ conference this week, Iowa’s Secretary of State argued that Republicans need to pass voter ID in order to advance their top policy goals, including banning abortion and same-sex marriage.

Matt Schultz (R), elected in the Tea Party wave of 2010, spoke at length about his support for implementing voter ID in a speech before the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition on Monday. In the process he accused the other side of cheating in order to win elections, but provided no evidence to back up this claim:

SCHULTZ: There are a whole lot of issues that we care about, abortion, gay marriage, a whole lot of social issues that we care deeply about. But you have to start caring about voter ID and election integrity as well, because if you don’t have that, you’ll never be able to make a difference in any other issue you care about. Never. Because they will cheat! They’ll cheat. And we need to make sure we stop them. So what do I need you to do? I need you start telling your friends and neighbors that you love voter ID. You love voter ID.

Watch it:

There’s a reason why Schultz couldn’t provide any evidence that people are using voter fraud at the polls to rig elections: None exists. In-person voter fraud is extraordinarily rare; a study in nearby Wisconsin found a fraud rate of 0.0002 percent, far less common than even being struck by lightning. Still, a dearth of actual voter fraud hasn’t stopped conservatives from using it as a phantom menace to gin up support for voter ID.

Schultz isn’t the only Republican official pushing voter ID as a means for enacting the Party’s policy goals. Indeed, because approximately 1 in 10 Americans — particularly young voters and minorities, groups who tend to vote Democratic — lack photo ID, a strict voter ID requirement would help Republicans win more elections. Last year, Pennsylvania House Majority Leader Mike Turzai famously declared that voter ID would help Mitt Romney win the state of Pennsylvania. Wisconsin State Sen. Glenn Grothman similarly argued that voter ID would help put Romney over the edge “in a close race.”