Notice that apathy was a big reason — roughly 4 million registered voters either weren't interested or didn't like the candidates. But polling place access was a major factor, too. Nearly a million Americans had "registration problems" while 750,000 found the polling location either too inconvenient or had transportation problems. And some 2.6 million voters said they were "too busy" to vote.

Now let's look at the 30 million Americans who weren't registered to vote in the first place in 2008. Their reasons:

Apathy plays a much larger role here — some 15.5 million Americans didn't register in 2008 because they weren't interested or they outright refused. An additional 1.2 million figured that their vote would not make a difference.

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But it wasn't all apathy. Some 5.7 million Americans either didn't know how or where to register or missed the deadlines. An additional 3.6 million Americans weren't eligible to vote, either because they didn't meet residency requirements or for other reasons (four states bar ex-felons from voting, for instance).

Over the years, experts have tried to come up with a number of proposals that might increase turnout. We could make Election Day a national holiday rather than holding it on a Tuesday. We could allow Americans to vote by email. We could make voting mandatory. And so forth. But few of these ideas have caught on yet. As a result, the United States still ranks incredibly low (pdf) among advanced countries in terms of voter turnout.