As President Obama said in his victory speech, far too many Americans waited in line for a very long time to vote this year and “we have to fix that.” Similarly, the candidates bombarded key states like Ohio and Florida, while ignoring concerns unique to voters in California or Mississippi. Election officials dreamed up new and increasingly creative ways to disenfranchise voters. Courts wrestled with state officials who, at times, even openly defied orders seeking to protect the vote. And partisan gerrymandering gave Republicans a House majority they did not earn and that the voters did not want. Here are five basic reforms that can be enacted before 2016 to fix many of the problems experienced during this year’s election:

1) Abolish The Electoral College

In a modern Democracy, there is simply no way to defend what happened in 2000, when the candidate rejected by the American people nonetheless became their president — albeit with an assist from five Supreme Court justices. Add to this the fact that the Electoral College offers copious opportunities for election rigging — such as Gov. Tom Corbett’s (R-PA) plan to give most of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes to Romney no matter who won the state — or the possibility that some of the 538 people chosen as members of the Electoral College could give their votes to someone other than the winner of their state, and this relic from more than 200 years ago becomes completely bonkers.

Additionally, while voters in Ohio were undoubtedly sick of the parade of political advertisements that hit their state this election cycle, there is a very real advantage to being from a swing state — presidential candidates have an extra reason to listen to your concerns and will potentially make campaign promises that benefit your state. The flip side of this is that major cities like Chicago, New York or Los Angeles, the deep south (including many African-American population centers) and much of the Great Plains do not enjoy this same access to the next president. The President of the United States should be the president of all the United States, and a voter in Harlem should have the same opportunity to make their case to a presidential candidate as a voter in Pensacola.

Most importantly, however, the President of the United States should be the person that most Americans want to be President of the United States. The way to make this happen is to abolish (or at least, make irrelevant) the Electoral College, either through constitutional amendment or through the National Popular Vote compact.

2) Abolish Partisan Election Officials

As if Katherine Harris did not make this point perfectly clear in 2000, partisan state election officials proved over and over again in 2012 that neither party should be in control of collecting and counting votes. Yet this year brought Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted’s war on early voting, attempted voter purges in Florida, Colorado and Iowa, and top election officials touting laws that do little more than keep minorities, low-income and student voters from the polls.

A better alternative is the Wisconsin plan, where a nonpartisan Government Accountability Board made up of retired judges runs elections, not partisan officials beholden to a political party.

3) Eliminate Partisan Gerrymandering

Based on early vote totals, which admittedly could change before the final tallies are available, voters cast over half a million more votes for a Democratic House candidate than for a Republican House candidate in 2012. Yet Republicans will control the House largely due to the kind of partisan gerrymandering that allows President Obama to carry the state of Ohio, but Democrats to only carry a quarter of its House districts. This is both unacceptable and unconstitutional.

There are many proposals for how to end partisan gerrymandering, which range from non-partisan redistricting commissions to judge-drawn districts to proportional representation. One thing is clear, however, a system that allows one party to seize control of the House for up to a decade simply because it wins in a redistricting year has to go.

4) Allow All Voters To Register On Election Day

Same day registration is the law in Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Wyoming, and it will soon be implemented in California as well. This basic reform can boost turnout by as much as 7 percent, and it should be the law nationwide. Congress could make it so tomorrow, at least with respect to Congressional elections, because the Constitution permits the United States to “at any time by law make or alter” a state’s election law.

5) Ensure Adequate Early Voting In All States

It should go without saying that when voters have to wait six hours or more in line to exercise their most fundamental right, that their state failed to provide them with adequate opportunities to exercise the franchise. Yet lawmakers and election officials in the key states of Ohio and Florida fought tooth and nail to cut the number of days when voters could cast an early ballot. Their electorates paid for it this year with unacceptably long lines — the kind that actively discourage people from waiting to cast a ballot. This performance must not be repeated in 2016.

Florida Governor Rick Scott (R-FL)

Although a federal court eventually struck down the unconstitutional restrictions on voter registration, the law succeeded in boosting the GOP’s prospects for the upcoming election during the months that it was in effect. During the 2008 election, there were 657,775 more registered Democrats in Florida than Republicans. A study conducted last August found that the Democratic advantage shrunk to 445,794 registered voters in the wake of the unconstitutional restrictions on registration, and it has now only recovered to an advantage of 535,987 registered voters.

So, in the wake of an unconstitutional law intended to make it harder to register voters, Republicans closed their voter registration gap by over 120,000 voters — even though the courts eventually struck down this unconstitutional law. As it turns out, even when voter suppression laws are eventually struck down, they can still work significant mischief in the interim.

Pennsylvania resident Colin Small was arrested Thursday after he was caught illegally destroying voter registration forms in Virginia. Smalls worked for a firm hired by the Republican Party of Virginia to register voters, but was spotted throwing away 8 voter registration forms in a dumpster on Monday, the deadline for registering to vote in Virginia.

The 31-year-old man was charged with four counts of destruction of voter registration applications, eight counts of failing to disclose voter registration applications and one count of obstruction of justice. Small was spotted by the owner of a store in Harrisonburg, Virginia, who became suspicious when he saw Small’s Pennsylvania license plate.

The Los Angeles Times has the details of the discarded forms:

Three of the voters turned out to be already registered, according to Donald Palmer, secretary of the Virginia State Board of Elections. The other five were not registered, and have since been added to the voter roll. Registration closed on Monday.

In Virginia, and other states, it’s a crime to accept a voter registration form and not turn it in. Small is charged with destroying voter registration applications and obstruction of justice.

“There is no indication this activity was widespread in our jurisdiction,” said a statement from the Rockingham County Sheriff’s Office. The investigation is continuing, the sheriff’s office said.

Small worked for Strategic Allied Consulting, a registration firm now being investigated for submitting fraudulent registration forms in Florida. The Republican National Committee paid more than $3 million to SAC but quickly cut ties once the fraud came to light. As for Small, Virginia Republican Chairman Pat Mullins said he was fired as soon as the allegations surfaced. RNC spokesman Sean Spicer said Small had “made a mistake” and that the RNC “fully supports” the charges against him.

Though this is now the second criminal investigation against voter registration employees hired by the Republican Party, it hasn’t halted the shady registration practices still operating in at least ten states.

CO Secretary of State Scott Gessler (R)

Denver Westword reports that Gessler’s office claims it has identified hundreds of non-citizens who are or were registered voters. But far fewer of those people ever actually voted:

Gessler’s office says that of 141 registered voters who aren’t citizens according to a federal database, 35 of them have voted in past elections — though some critics dispute how accurate and up-to-date that data might be. Still, of the fourteen voters who were recently removed as a result of that federal check, none actually have vote history, meaning there is no overlap with the 35 voters.

While clearly those 35 voters should not have voted if they were indeed non-citizens, this is not a significant percentage of the Colorado voting population. Indeed out of the 2,401,462 total votes cast in the state in the presidential election, even if all 35 illegally voted in that election, they would have accounted for less than 0.0015 percent of the vote.

Like Gov. Rick Scott’s (R-FL) failed purge effort in Florida, Gessler spent a lot of time, money, and resources to find only a handful of potentially ineligible voters. And while his office focused on this, technical glitches with their online voter registration system caused 779 Coloradans voter registrations to be lost.