[Astronauts Cast U.S. Votes from the International Space Station]
Published on
5 November 2026 – 9:34 GMT+1
NASA astronaut Anil Menon announced that he and his colleagues Luke Delaney and Jessica Watkins had cast their votes from the International Space Station, using a secure electronic system guaranteed to deliver the ballots to election officials.
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On X, Menon posted that voting from orbit is a viable reality for his crew.
He attached a 29‑second video showing an “I voted” sticker and a tour of his private cabin aboard the station. In the clip, he filled out the ballot on a computer and transmitted the form to Harris County, Texas, where his vote was officially recorded.
Harris County serves as the usual electoral destination for NASA astronauts because it houses the Johnson Space Center, the agency’s primary hub for managing human spaceflight missions.
How do votes travel back to Earth?
Despite the vast distance, the voting process relies on the same NASA infrastructure that NASA uses daily for data and message exchange with the station through its space communications and navigation system.
According to the agency, the procedure begins with the astronaut requesting an absentee ballot via the “Federal Post Card Application,” a form also employed by U.S. military personnel stationed far from home.
Once completed on board, the ballot is transmitted via NASA’s “Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System” to a ground antenna at the agency’s White Sands facility in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
From there, it is forwarded to Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center and then to the relevant county election official for registration and counting.
NASA emphasizes that the process is subject to strict security measures; the ballot is encrypted and accessible only to the astronaut and the authorized election official.
A voting tradition that began almost three decades ago
Although voting from beyond Earth is an unusual practice, it is not new. The tradition originated in 1997 when the Texas legislature passed a law permitting NASA astronauts to vote in U.S. elections while in orbit.
Astronaut David Wolf was the first to cast his vote from the Russian space station Mir that same year, nearly three years before the International Space Station welcomed its first permanent crew in November 2000.
The three astronauts who voted this year arrived on separate missions: Delaney and Watkins launched on 1 October last year as part of SpaceX’s Crew‑13 mission, while Menon joined the crew aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in mid‑July.
Together, they are living with four other crew members—Canadian astronaut Joshua Kutryk and Russian cosmonauts Anna Kikina, Pyotr Dubrov, and Sergei Teteriatnikov. Kutryk and Teteriatnikov are part of Crew‑13, while Dubrov and Kikina were on Soyuz with Menon.
