The one variety of illegal voting that hasn’t yet been discovered in Washington State is the non-citizen voter. Not necessarily because it doesn’t happen, but because it is extremely difficult to detect. There don’t seem to be any readily accessible databases for distinguishing citizens from aliens. John Carlson, a popular conservative radio host in Seattle, proposed an interesting solution to this problem on his program yesterday as he was interviewing Secretary of State Sam Reed. Carlson suggested that Reed should persuade the Mexican government to give him a copy of the Matricula Consular ID card database so his elections staff could cross check the Mexican file against the voter database. Secretary Reed embraced the idea and agreed to contact not only the Mexican authorities but other countries whose consulates issue identification cards to their nationals living in the U.S. Since an increasing number of businesses and even government agencies now accept the Matricula Consular as valid identification, it wouldn’t be a bad idea for every state’s election officials to have access to this list in order to prevent vote fraud by ineligible foreigners.