One sure way to ignite fireworks this Fourth of July is to call the United States a democracy. In the minds of many political purists, it’s a republic, and if you forget that out loud, they will be all over you.

In a republic, as you know, we don’t gather in a town hall or public square and hold a referendum on every policy issue. We pick representatives to govern on our behalf, and we hold them accountable. It’s a good system unless they wrap themselves in secrecy.

Which too many of them try to do.

Today, we commemorate the Declaration of Independence, a bold experiment that put ultimate authority in the hands of the people rather than the government. But as James Madison once said, “A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both.”

So we observe a lesser known anniversary, too. The federal Freedom of Information Act took effect 41 years ago today, necessitated by government’s aversion to openness.

Before FOIA, citizens who wanted public records had to demonstrate a need to know the information contained in the requested record. FOIA supposedly established their right to know, and agencies were expected to grant requests unless there was a clear and compelling reason not to.

That was the theory. In practice, it was hard to get agencies to comply, and harder still after John Ashcroft, President Bush’s first attorney general came along, directing federal agencies to withhold information unless faced with an airtight case for its release. That’s one reason FOIA is a disappointment, but not the only one.

The biggest is that the elected and appointed officials who control policy, often don’t want to be held accountable.

Examples abound of public agencies withholding public information from the public. Here are four.

“Thurston County Prosecutor Ed Holm was accused of sexual bias by three former deputies who sued and won $1.52 million in damages and lost wages. The local newspaper, The Olympian, thought the public was entitled to know how much the county and its insurance carrier paid attorneys to defend the losing cause, but the county wouldn’t tell.

The answer, it turns out, was about $4 million. The showdown inspired a new Washington law specifying that attorney billing in such matters is a public record. The measure passed by comfortable margins despite opposition from local government and school lobbyists.

“Another prosecutor, Kootenai County’s Bill Douglas, exchanged hundreds of office e-mails with an underling, Marina Kalani, the former coordinator of the county’s juvenile drug court. In 2005, the federally funded drug court was scrubbed while under financial scrutiny, and reporters for The Spokesman-Review wanted to review the e-mails between Kalani and her boss for any hints about what went wrong.

The county refused, and the newspaper went to court in 2005. Two months ago, the Idaho Supreme Court ruled that the e-mails are public records – not much of a stretch since Kootenai County policies say the same thing – but reporters got them only Tuesday, or at least some of them.

“Let’s talk more about e-mail. The seven Strobel sisters in Burien, Wash., owned a popular restaurant in an area where city government fancied a new “Town Square” development with spiffy condominiums and trendy shops and eateries. Popular or not, a longtime family diner didn’t fit in.

So the city condemned the restaurant. Why? Because, it turned out, it would be in the way of a street. It all might have been just a garden-variety condemnation dispute until the acquisition of e-mail messages revealed that the city manager had directed his staff to “make damn sure” that road went through the building site.

The Strobel sisters still lost their court challenge, but the people of Burien now have background details they wouldn’t have known without the availability of public records. That’s one path to accountability.

“More than six years ago, a third-grader at Spokane’s Logan Elementary School died after eating a peanut butter cookie he was given on a field trip, even though he had a known peanut allergy. School officials not only denied The Spokesman-Review’s request for witness accounts of how the tragedy occurred, they sued the newspaper for asking.

The matter is now before the state Supreme Court, which heard lawyers’ arguments last March. Justice James M. Johnson noted then that school district practices put citizens, even parents, in the same jeopardy as a news organization. “The average person asking for public records – one, can’t afford to fight the legal bills, and two, can’t afford the delay,” said Johnson.

In other words, access to open records is much more than a squabble between the press and the government.

The list of similar incidents goes on, here and around the nation.

There is a measure of good news at the state level where Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna’s office has produced a set of model guidelines meant to remind public entities of their duty to meet public records requests. Even better, the Legislature created a Sunshine Committee that will examine whether to roll back an explosion of exemptions that have been established over the years to the state’s public records requirements.

Clearly, the worst offenders are at the federal level, which is notorious for interminable delays. Spokesman-Review reporter Karen Dorn Steele has been waiting since 2004 on a request to the Office of Naval Research for a list of radiation research projects it’s funded. Her experience is typical.

While the law sets deadlines for responding to such requests, there’s no effective way to enforce them. Courts may impose penalties for wrongful denials, but they don’t do the same for tardiness. And if an agency, knowing it’s about to lose an access case, suddenly releases the information, the courts call it voluntary compliance and the requester has no way to recoup what may be thousands of dollars in legal costs.

U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., has been championing legislation to fix some of these loopholes, but he needs support from his colleagues in Congress.

Meanwhile, lest we Americans get too smug about 231 years of independence, we should reflect on the story about a woman who asked Benjamin Franklin if the drafters of the Constitution had given Americans a monarchy or a republic. “A republic,” Franklin is reported to have said, “if you can keep it.”

More than two centuries later, we’re still struggling with our representatives over that point.