Trust in government is at a 20-year low. Voters are angry. Populists on both the left and right are railing against “rigged” systems – including elections themselves. It seems like we’ve created a perpetual-motion democracy in which distrust of government has created a distrust in elections, which further contributes to distrust in government, and so on in perpetuity.

At its core, the problem is that voters don’t feel represented in Washington. Much of this frustration centers around the fact that they have limited options, neither of which they feel is particularly attuned to their interests. If policymakers don’t offer solutions to fix our electoral system and restore faith that our representative democracy is working the way it should, voters will continue to react with anger and deliver wave elections where they “throw the bums out” every other year. As we’ve seen over the past few election cycles, these reactive waves make it even harder to govern, further contributing to the cycle of frustration that led to them in the first place.

Yet hope is not lost. This week, a major reform bill – the Fair Representation Act – was introduced in the House which would make two big and promising changes to our electoral system. It would implement ranked choice voting and independent redistricting across all 50 states.

The first fix – ranked choice voting – is also called instant runoff voting, and it guarantees that whoever wins has some level of support from the majority of voters. Most of our elections have only one round of voting, and the person with the most votes wins, even if he or she didn’t get a majority. That creates a scenario in which voters feel the need to select from the top two front-runners in order to ensure their vote isn’t wasted. In primaries, this benefits incumbents and those that are able to appeal to the ideological bases. In general elections, it helps protect the two major political parties.

But in a ranked choice voting system, you can rank candidates based on your preference. When the votes are first counted, each candidate receives the “first place” votes cast for him or her. If no candidate has an absolute majority, the candidates with the fewest votes are eliminated, and the votes of those who selected them are distributed to those voters’ second choice. This process is repeated until a candidate has consolidated at least 50 percent of the vote. In the end, it ensures that voters can pick the person who best represents them, without worrying that candidate will be a so-called spoiler. And it forces politicians to build a big-tent coalition – appealing even to those who are already committed to another candidate to try and win their second-choice vote.

Some states are already beginning to experiment with this option. After electing Gov. Paul LePage in Maine in 2010, with less than 38 percent of the vote, Mainers decided they needed a change. More than 55 percent of Maine voters had wanted one of the two major (and more mainstream) candidates, but they split the vote and ended up with neither. It wasn’t an anomaly – in the last eight elections, only one governor (independent Angus King) had received over 50 percent of the vote. So in 2016, a citizen-led effort added a ballot measure to create an election system that allows for ranked choice voting. Unsurprisingly, it passed easily.

But this problem isn’t limited to Maine. Twelve U.S. senators were elected by a plurality – but not a majority – of voters in their most recent elections. A dozen of the most recent gubernatorial elections were also decided by a plurality. And President Donald Trump only won 198 of the 270 electoral votes required with an absolute majority of the popular vote. If implemented across the country, ranked choice voting would go a long way toward giving voters more options and restoring their sense that policymakers truly represent them.

The second necessary fix in the Fair Representation Act would empower citizens with independent redistricting. Most states currently let their state legislatures draw state legislative and congressional maps. This means that politicians get to pick their voters, which creates highly partisan maps that skew the vote in favor of the party in power. By taking this process out of the hands of politicians, voters can be sure that their districts are fair and competitive. And it works. While only a third of congressional districts nationwide were drawn in a neutral way, 58 percent of those that switched their presidential vote in the last election came from those states.