Election day is right around the corner. Over 150 million Americans will cast a ballot next month to determine who will be the next President of the United States, including four people on the International Space Station. Voting from space might be a given today, but it took an astronaut being denied the right to vote for the practice to be legally enshrined.
In 1996, President Bill Clinton ran for a second term in office against Senator Bob Dole, the Republican nominee. The plans for the International Space Station were announced back in 1994, but the station’s assembly in low Earth orbit was still a few years away. However, the United States also agreed to collaborate with Russia in space during this intermediary period, creating the Shuttle-Mir program. American astronauts would spend long-duration stints living on Mir, Russia’s space station.
NASA explored multiple options for Blaha, who was registered to vote in Texas, to cast his ballot in orbit. The space agency initially wanted Blaha to simply vote by email, according to the New York Times. However, the Texas Secretary of State announced state laws didn’t allow for email voting or voting from space in any way. George W. Bush, then-Texas governor, could have signed a proclamation to create an exception but didn’t.
Every alternative around this roadblock proved unsuccessful. Plenty of ideas were pondered. NASA thought the Pentagon could set up a makeshift system using similar measures to how overseas personnel cast ballots. Officials even thought it could be legally possible for Bhala to designate his wife to vote on his behalf.
NASA and Texas eventually found a solution in August 1997 after Bhala returned home and Clinton won four more years in office. The Texas Legislature passed a law essentially allowing what the space agency wanted to do in the first place: send an email. The New York Times reported:
Today, however, the Texas Secretary of State, Tony Garza, who introduced himself at a news conference as ‘’the jerk who wouldn’t let the astronaut vote last November,’’ announced that a new computer program would allow astronauts to cast votes via E-mail, using their on-board laptops to send them to NASA, which would forward the encrypted ballots to county election officials.
Mr. Garza said he was delighted that the new procedure, authorized under a measure signed last month by Gov. George W. Bush, would allow legal certification of the votes.
‘’It was terribly frustrating to me,’’ Mr. Garza said of his decision that Dr. Blaha was ineligible to vote. ‘’Here we had an individual who clearly wanted to participate in the process, even though he was in outer space.’’
Astronaut David Wolf became the first American to cast a ballot in space a few months later on Mir. The same system will be used on the International Space Station in November. Astronauts fill out their ballot electronically in orbit. The ballots are encrypted and relayed to NASA’s White Sands Complex in New Mexico, sent via landlines to mission control at Johnson Space Center in Houston, and finally electronically delivered to the astronauts’ local county clerks.
It might seem trivial to put all the effort in for a single ballot, but living in space is an incredibly isolating experience. Bhala, the third American to live on Mir, began experiencing depression once Atlantis undocked from the station. After returning, he admits to missing his wife and family to a degree he never felt before, flipping through a family photo album every night. It took Bhala about a month to psychologically adjust to living on Mir.