Step 2 is to establish congressional districts with multiple representatives. Smaller states with fewer than six seats would elect all seats statewide. In bigger states, independent commissions would draw districts designed to elect up to five seats based on traditional criteria like keeping counties intact. Multi-winner districts were used in some House elections as recently as the 1960s and remain common in local and state elections.

What would transform politics would be combining ranked choice voting with multi-winner districts. That would replace winner-take-all voting — whereby up to 49.9 percent of the voters win nothing — with fair representation where the majority elects the most seats, but everyone gains the power to elect their fair share.

Consider Connecticut, where Democrats in 2016 easily won all five congressional seats, and Oklahoma, where Republicans won all five seats by landslide. Under the Fair Representation Act, House candidates would run statewide in both states. Voters would rank the candidates on their ballots. In the first round of counting, any candidate with one-sixth of the vote plus one would win a seat, while the last place candidate would be eliminated and her votes redistributed among the remaining candidates. This process would continue until all five seats were filled. The complex math of the process is in service of a simple principle: ensuring that a majority group elects the most seats, but not more than its fair share.

The result: Republicans would likely win two seats in Connecticut, and Democrats a seat or two in Oklahoma. And the same result would be replicated across the nation: A computer projection of how the law would work showed that in all states with at least three House seats, there would be no single-party districts.

That means there would be rural Democrats and urban Republicans. Members of both major parties would share districts, with new incentives to collaborate on legislation addressing their shared constituents’ needs. Candidates would be forced to reflect a greater mix of views and voters would have real choices, including third party and independent candidates. A more representative and functional Congress would regain legitimacy.

Congress not only has the power to act to reform its elections, but the obligation. In the past, it mandated single-winner congressional districts to avoid partisans manipulating outcomes with at-large elections, but that approach has led to today’s polarized politics. It’s time for a better standard.