While most
Americans will flock to the polls Tuesday to cast their vote for the next U.S.
president, two U.S. citizens will beam their ballots down from the
International Space Station as they fly 220 miles (354 km) above Earth.
Like all
U.S. spaceflyers since 1997, NASA astronauts Michael
Fincke and Gregory Chamitoff can vote in their local and national elections
thanks to a handy Texas state law that ensures their ballots can be counted, even
from space.
"So I'm
going to exercise my privilege as a citizen and actually vote from space on
Election Day," Fincke, the space station's Expedition 18 commander, told SPACE.com
before he left Earth. "I think the candidates this year are exciting in and of
themselves. But hopefully we get people to realize what a privilege it is, and
they exercise and get a chance to vote."
Only four Americans in NASA's 50-year history have voted from space, largely
because the Texas law allowing was passed just 11 years ago, said Nicole
Cloutier-Lemasters, a spokesperson with NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston,
Texas. And just one of those four, now-retired
spaceflyer Leroy Chiao, voted during a presidential election in 2004 while
commanding the space station's Expedition 10 crew.
"I was so
busy preparing for my ISS mission in 2004 that I almost forgot about the fact
that I would be in space during that U.S. presidential election," Chiao told SPACE.com,
adding that it was his wife Karen who remembered he'd be in orbit on Election
Day. "As she and NASA looked into it, the process turned out to be fairly
straightforward. Another astronaut had already voted from space earlier for a
state election, so the law allowing this was already established. It was
just a matter of applying it to the presidential election."
The 1997 Texas
bill allowed NASA's first orbital voter David Wolf to cast his ballot from
Russia's Space Station Mir, Cloutier-Lemasters told SPACE.com. Astronauts
Michael Lopez-Alegria and Clayton Anderson also voted during their separate
missions to the International Space Station in 2006 and 2007, respectively.
Fincke and
Chamitoff have been encouraging
the American people to remember that no matter which presidential candidate
they choose, be it a ballot for Barack Obama (D-Ill.) of John McCain (R-Arizona),
that they remember to vote above all else.
"Voting is
the most important statement Americans can make in fulfilling a cherished right
to select its leaders," Fincke said in a NASA TV video with Chamitoff. "So this
Election Day, take time to go to the polls and vote. If we can do it, so can
you."
How
astronauts vote from space
The process
of voting from space actually begins on the ground. According to the 1997 bill,
astronauts in space can cast an absentee ballot from their spacecraft with the
help of the County Clerk of Harris and Brazoria counties, which contain Houston
and its surrounding area.
The County
Clerk's office prepares a secure electronic ballot that is then relayed to the
International Space Station via NASA's Mission Control room at the Johnson
Space Center. Meanwhile, the Clerk's Office sends a separate e-mail to the
astronaut with login information to access the ballot and vote.
"So there's
this plan in place and I'll have an electronic ballot and be able to vote from
up here," Chamitoff told SPACE.com from the space station recently.
The
completed ballot is then beamed back to Mission Control and sent back to the
County Clerk's office to be tallied.
The
process, Chiao explained, is an appreciated link to life on Earth among NASA's
spaceflyers.
"I was
thankful for everyone making it possible for me to vote from space," he said,
adding that he too hoped it encouraged others to vote. "I think it was an
important symbolic gesture. Also, it was important to me personally."
Coincidentally,
Chiao is also outside the U.S. during this presidential election, but not in space. He made sure to vote early before departing the country on travel, he told SPACE.com.
There is
one drawback to voting from space. Unlike the privacy of a booth on Earth, at
least one other person besides the astronaut will actually know who the
spaceflyer voted for, since a voting officer must decrypt the secure form in
order to count it, Fincke said.
"So one
other person, she's going to see who I voted for," he said. "If you can't trust
her, you can't trust anyone. So it's a pretty solid system."
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