• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

This Is How Astronauts Vote From Space

October 30, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Many consider voting a civic duty, even in those countries where it is not compulsory. People go to great lengths to exercise their democratic right of choosing their representatives in politics, but sometimes circumstances don’t make it easy. Imagine if you want to vote but you are in space – your nearest drop-off location for your ballot might be more difficult to reach than others.

Cosmonauts have been voting in space almost exclusively by proxy since 1971, and usually without a secret ballot, instead just telling ground control how they intended to vote. French astronaut Thomas Pesquet also voted from space in 2017 by giving a French colleague the authority to vote on his behalf. US astronauts, however, vote directly instead, which requires a bit more complexity.

Advertisement

First of all, just like any American away from home, the astronauts need to fill out a Federal Post Card Application to request an absentee ballot. With that, the astronauts are allowed to fill out an electronic ballot while on board the ISS. 

The ballots are encrypted and uploaded onto the station computer and then transmitted to NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System, which sends the data down to Earth to the ground antenna in White Sands Test Facility.

The data from the antenna is then sent to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. From there, the ballots are delivered electronically to the relevant county clerk for filing. A complicated, but easier (and cheaper) way than having the ballot sent up and then back down on spacecraft.

It was astronaut John Blaha aboard the Russian space station Mir in 1996 that started this process. He wanted to vote in the 1996 presidential election. NASA had a plan, but the effort was stopped by the Secretary of State of Texas, as the state did not yet have a provision for electronic voting. A bill to allow that was passed in 1997, and astronaut David Wolf later became the first American to vote in an election from space, by voting in Houston’s 1997 local election.

Advertisement

Since 2004, with the exception of 2012, American astronauts have consistently voted from the ISS. During the 2012 election, both American astronauts on board, Sunita Williams and Kevin Ford, had submitted their ballots before their flight. Williams, who is currently on the ISS, probably didn’t have a chance to do that this year; her mission was extended from one week to 8 months due to Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft series of problems.

The only astronaut to have voted from space in more than one election is Kathleen Rubins, who voted in both 2016 and 2020.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Cricket-Manchester test likely to be postponed after India COVID-19 case
  2. EU to attend U.S. trade meeting put in doubt by French anger
  3. Soccer-West Ham win again, Leicester and Napoli falter
  4. Was Jesus A Hallucinogenic Mushroom? One Scholar Certainly Thought So

Source Link: This Is How Astronauts Vote From Space

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Meet Ned: The Lonely Lefty Snail Looking For Love
  • “America Will Lead The Next Giant Leap”: NASA Announces New Milestone In Hunt For Exoplanets
  • What Did Neanderthals Sound Like?
  • One Star System Could Soon Dazzle Us Twice With Nova And Supernova Explosions
  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version