The pair of astronauts stranded on the International Space Station by Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft won’t be on Earth before the 2024 elections are over.
But they’ll still be able to exercise their right to vote, and they plan to.
“I sent down my request for a ballot today,” one of the astronauts, Butch Wilmore, said to reporters Friday. “It’s a very important role that we play as citizens including those elections, and NASA makes it very easy for us to do that.”
Sunita Williams, the other astronaut, agreed with Wilmore’s statement.
“It’s a very important duty that we have as citizens and looking forward to being able to vote from space, which is pretty cool,” she said.
So how will they vote from outer space?
While they didn’t offer any specifics as to who they will vote for, the process of how they will vote varies from the norm. They don’t have any physical polling stations, and won’t mail in their ballots either, so instead, they vote on a secure PDF file provided to them electronically by election officials in Texas.
“Before sending the astronauts their ballot, it is transferred to a fillable document so that they can make their selections, save it, and send it back. A test ballot with a unique password is always sent first. Once they vote on their live ballot, it is returned, printed, and processed with other ballots,” Rosio Torres-Segura, a spokeswoman for the Harris County clerk in Texas, told NBC News.
The ballot has clickable boxes for the astronauts to place their vote. Both astronauts reside in Texas, so among a variety of options, they’ll get to choose whether they prefer former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris in the presidential election and whether they prefer Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) or Rep. Colin Allred (D-TX) in their state’s Senate election.
The latter election is expected to be particularly competitive.
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Astronauts have been able to vote since 1997, the same year the Texas legislature passed a bill allowing astronauts to vote from space. David Wolf was the first American to vote from space in the same year.
Williams and Wilmore are expected to be stranded on the space station until February, when a SpaceX spacecraft is expected to take them back home.