The US is ranked as a 'Flawed Democracy', what needs to change?

[Bofferbrauer2]

When the United States of America got established, due to it's sheer size and not-yet-existing faster ways of transport and communication, the electoral system made much sense back then. But with the advent of trains and especially the telegraph, it had already become archaic even before the civil war started. And yet it is still in use today, with all it's flaws that make it's voting system very easy to play around.

There are several ways to solve the issue. I'll list some of the potential solutions here:

1. The easiest way: Make it a 2-step process. On the first round you can vote for whoever you feel like, and if neither gets past 50%, the 2 candidates with the highest results get into a runoff. It's a system that is in place in many other countries, and that way the spoiler effect would be eliminated, since there is nobody else on the second round, just the 2 candidates with the highest results in the first round.
2. Switch to a single transferable vote system. That way one can still vote for their preferred party without wasting their vote, as they can put the party (or parties) that they don't like to the bottom of the list. The biggest problem is that even in countries who have such a voting system, like Australia, not everybody knows how to vote in those ballots correctly, which can leave the door wide open to some shenanigans from parties who want to force some result.
3. Outlaw the winner-takes-all system. Winner-takes-all basically forces election over time to become 2-horse races due to tactical voting. Without it, minor parties would also get some chance at representation, which could defuse the increasingly partisan politics of the US, as the result could then very well be that neither gets past 270 electoral votes and thus would have to do a coalition with another party - and royally pissing off a potential coalition partner is simply not an option in such a type of government. It is also one where the electoral college could be a good thing to some degree, as a small party who doesn't have nationwide representation but instead focuses on one or a couple key states would have an easier chance to get representation than getting drowned out in a nationwide proportional election. For those who don't understand what I mean by that, look at the British elections and imagine that the SNP, Sinn Féin and Plaid Cymru would need to win the popular vote in all of the UK instead of just in their regions they're actually representing.
4. While we're at the topic of the electoral college, it needs to be either abolished, or, with a system like I explained at point 3 above, seriously overhauled. So let's get into ways on how the electoral college could be reformed: The first step: Remove the electors in the electoral college and simply count them as points that a party gets, which removes any possibility of unfaithful electors and the costs of sending hundreds of persons to D.C. just to cast a pointless vote. 2. The number of electoral votes hinges on the amount of senators and house representatives a state has, so a minimum of 3 (2 senators and 1 representative). So either this number gets reduced to a minimum of 1 with the same number of electoral votes, redistributing the freed up electoral votes proportionally by population, or increase the number of total electoral votes so that 3 would actually be representative to the population of the states with the lowest population (For comparison, elections for the European parliament have a minimum of 6, attributed to Luxembourg, Malta and Cyprus (though the latter should have more by now, as it's population rose rapidly in the last decade) and a maximum of 96 for Germany, which also has roughly 16 times the population of Malta or Luxembourg).

I could come with some more suggestions, but I'll leave it at that for now, as it's already quite the wall of text.