Voting in a presidential election might seem tough when you're in a space station orbiting 250 miles above earth.
That's exactly where NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore have been stuck since June, after a series of malfunctions on their Boeing Starliner spacecraft.
NASA is expected to decide in the next few days if Williams and Wilmore can use the Starliner to fly home soon, or further delay their original one-week stay until February, when the pair would have to hitch a ride to Earth on a SpaceX Dragon capsule.
If that happens, the astronauts would still be in space when the presidential election is held on Nov. 5.
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It turns out, however, that voting from space is actually pretty easy.
In 1997 Texas passed a law allowing astronauts to cast a ballot from orbit. David Wolfe was the first, voting in a local election from his perch on board the Russian space station, MIR.
In October 2004, astronaut Leroy Chiao was about to launch from Russia for an extended stay onboard the International Space Station.
"I realized, hey, I'm going to miss the presidential election," Chiao tells Scripps News.
NASA came to the rescue, allowing Chiao to cast the first-ever space vote for president in 2004 using a secret electronic absentee ballot.
"I was allowed to vote from the International Space Station," Chiao says. "And I was able to put my vote in this encrypted Word document, save it, and then email it back."
American astronauts have been voting from space ever since. The ISS even has a place for a makeshift voting booth. Ballots get beamed down to New Mexico, then over to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, and eventually on to county clerks who count the votes.
"I was very happy that the process was there, and I was able to go ahead and fulfill my civic duty and my desire to vote in that election," says Chiao.
As astronauts head back to the moon in the next few years, and eventually to Mars, NASA says votes will continue to be counted, from anywhere in the solar system.
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