The unbelievably tight governor’s race has put Washington state’s electoral system under the microscope. The process of counting and recounting votes has produced irregularities, some of which would have continued had the race not been so close.

In response, political leaders are drawing up long laundry lists to clean up the process. The state Legislature should carefully consider these proposals and their ramifications on future elections. Two suggestions jump out as common-sense moves that wouldn’t appear to give one party an advantage or introduce complexity: a different color scheme for provisional ballots and a paper trail for votes cast on electronic machines.

The first change has been suggested because of what happened with some provisional ballots during the last election. Provisional ballots are provided to people who, for whatever reason, show up at the wrong election site. These people are allowed to vote but those votes are not to be counted until elections officials verify that they were cast by registered voters.

In a typical election, the counting of provisional ballots doesn’t draw much attention, because there aren’t enough of them to overturn results. But the mishandling of these ballots in the last election was significant because the margin was so thin. Some voters placed their provisional ballots directly into vote-counting machines. These ballots were irretrievable because they looked the same as the others.

If provisional ballots were a different color, they could be segregated from the rest, and election officials could go back and verify voter registrations.

The second reform would mandate that any county that uses electronic voting machines provide a paper trail that could be used for verification. Snohomish, Yakima and Skamania counties have ATM-type voting machines but with a crucial difference: no receipt. A paper trail would give voters the assurance that their vote was accepted by the computer and it would provide something to count in the instance of manual recounts.

Skamania County did not use its machines in the last election, but Snohomish and Yakima counties did. When it came to the manual recount, those two counties’ system posed a problem. What would be counted by hand? A paper trail would’ve solved that.

A better example of why a paper trail is needed resides in North Carolina. In Carteret County, an electronic voting machine didn’t record 4,438 votes because of a programming error. Without a paper trail, there’s no way to rescue those votes. The result there is a re-vote, rather than a recount. It’s easy to see what an error of that magnitude would’ve meant in Washington’s governor’s race.

These two reforms are by no means the only ones the Legislature should consider, but they offer a good start and will demonstrate that lawmakers have learned from this year’s mistakes.