Here are two critical steps to fixing what is broken:

1. Currently we have public funding of campaigns, however, it is funneled through private businesses which charge a little more to give to the candidates and causes of their choice.  If our hard earned money is going to fund political campaigns, we should have control over where it goes.  Establish public financing for elections. As a rule, elected officials are beholden to whomever pays their campaign bills. If we want our council members beholden to voters, and not to deep-pocketed donors, the public must be willing to pick up the tab. Too expensive? Unfortunately, it is a case of "Pay now or pay later" and failing to pay for campaigns up front will cost the public many times more in special favors and other quid pro quo after the election. The U.S. Congress is the best example of this problem. Lack of public financing also gives a huge advantage to wealthy, well-connected candidates over those who simply have great ideas and enthusiasm and not enough money to raise public awareness.

2. Replace plurality elections with proportional representation (PR). The idea behind proportional representation is that groups should win seats in roughly the same percentage as the votes they received. That is, 60 percent of the vote gets you 60 percent of the seats, not all of them. And 20 percent of the vote gets you 20 percent of the seats, not none of them. Thus, in a city council election that was 60/40 Democrat/Republican, a five-seat council would ideally be comprised of three Democrats and two Republicans. How do we achieve PR? We could adopt Choice Voting on the local non-partisan levels, which like Instant Runoff Voting, has voters rank their candidates, and ensures little or no wasted votes. For the State Legislature the voters of each of the parties could arrange their lists in their direct primary elections and these list could then be presented to the general electorate in the general election.  PR encourages more candidates to run for office, unlike our present system, in which similar candidates actually hurt each other's chances of winning by splitting the vote. John Cleese gives a brief explanation of PR in this video:
http:// archive.fairvote.org/index.php?page=2266.