Two American astronauts He was stranded in the International Space Station By February, Friday said they plan to vote from space in the November election.
Butch Wilmore, one of the astronauts, said in a phone call to reporters Friday afternoon, “I sent in my request for a vote today.” “We have a very important role to play as citizens, including in these elections, and NASA makes it very easy for us.”
Another, Sunita Williams, agreed.
“We have a very important role as citizens, and we expect to be able to vote from space, which is pretty cool,” he said.
Election officials in Harris County, Texas, home to NASA’s Johnson Space Station, said they have a process in place to work with NASA to help voters cast their ballots.
“Before sending the ballot to the astronauts, it is transferred to a fillable document so they can make their selections, save them and send them back. A test slip with a unique password is always sent first. After they vote on the live ballot, they are returned, printed and processed with other ballots,” he said.
Astronauts have been voting from space since 1997, when the Texas legislature passed a bill allowing NASA employees to vote from space. David Wolf became the first American to vote from space while aboard the Mir Space Station in 1997, the agency said, while NASA astronaut Kate Rubins voted from the International Space Station in the 2020 election.
Wilmore and Williams have been stuck aboard the International Space Station since early June after their spacecraft ran into a series of in-flight problems for the nearly eight-day mission. Astronauts will return to Earth in a SpaceX capsule They went into orbit, not in the Boeing Starliner spacecraft.