How NASA astronauts vote from space

With Election Day on the horizon, many Americans are making plans to vote — but some of those votes will have to travel an awfully long way. For the NASA astronauts on board the International Space Station (ISS), they have to make plans to cast their ballots from 250 miles above the Earth’s surface, where they are orbiting in space.

Fortunately,there is a system in place to make sure that astronauts get their say in democracy, though they do have to fill out an absentee ballot as there aren’t any polling stations nearby. Astronauts like NASA’s Loral O’Hara and Jasmin Moghbeli, shown above, voted in the Texas primaries in march this year, using an electronic system that conveys their votes from the electronic ballot they fill in to Mission Control at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, which sends them on to the county clerk’s office.

NASA’s Near Space Network enables astronauts on the International Space Station to communicate with Earth and electronically deliver election ballots from space. NASA

Though it might sound like a hassle, astronauts have expressed their excitement at getting to vote from space. When NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams found out that they would be staying on the ISS longer than originally planned due to issues with the Boeing Starliner spacecraft they traveled to the ISS on, they said that voting from space would be a special experience.

“It’s a very important duty that we have as citizens and I’m looking forward to being able to vote from space, which is pretty cool,” Williams said in a press conference when the decision was announced. “I sent down my request for a ballot today,” Wilmore said at the time. “It’s a very important role that we all play as citizens, to be included in those elections, and NASA makes it very easy for us to do that.”

Astronaut voting has been in place since the late 1990s, and started when NASA astronaut John Blaha, who was based on the Mir space station, said he wanted to vote, but there was no secure way for him to do so. A system was set up the next year, in conjunction with the Texas state legislature, and David Wolf became the first U.S. astronaut to vote from space in 1997.

There are some complexities to the process, though. Marta Durham, the Daily Operations and Crew Support instructor at NASA, explained that absentee ballots must be hand-signed, not electronically signed, so they usually try to get ballots signed before astronauts leave Earth. But with the case of Wilmore and Williams, because they are staying longer than expected, they needed to print out the ballots in space, sign them, and then scan their signatures. And the problem with that is that scanners use glass, and glass is not allowed on the ISS for safety reasons.

In the end, Durham did some experimenting and found that the iPads that the astronauts use on the station have cameras which work well enough as scanners — and the only challenge with that was getting the piece of paper to lie flat without gravity. But it was all managed in the end, so both Wilmore and Williams were able to cast their votes.