Voting in a presidential election can be difficult when you’re in a space station orbiting 250 miles above the Earth.

This is exactly where NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore have been stuck since June after a series of malfunctions occurred on their Boeing Starliner spacecraft.

NASA is expected to decide in the next few days whether Williams and Wilmore can use the Starliner for their imminent flight home or whether they can postpone their original week-long stay until February. The couple would then have to fly to Earth in a SpaceX Dragon capsule.

If this were to happen, the astronauts would still be in space during the presidential election on November 5.

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However, it turns out that voting from space is actually quite easy.

In 1997, Texas passed a law allowing astronauts to vote from orbit. David Wolfe was the first person to vote in a local election from his seat aboard the Russian space station MIR.

In October 2004, astronaut Leroy Chiao was scheduled to launch from Russia for an extended stay on board the International Space Station.

“I realized, hey, I’m going to miss the presidential election,” Chiao tells Scripps News.

NASA came to Chiao’s aid and enabled him to hold the first presidential election in space in 2004 using a secret electronic mail ballot.

“I was allowed to vote from the International Space Station,” says Chiao. “And I was able to type my vote into this encrypted Word document, save it, and then email it back.”

Since then, American astronauts have been voting from space. There is even room for a makeshift voting booth on the ISS. The ballots are beamed to New Mexico, then to the Johnson Space Center in Houston and finally to the district officials who count the votes.

“I was very happy that this process existed and that I was able to fulfill my civic duty and my desire to vote in this election,” Chiao says.

When astronauts return to the moon and eventually Mars in the coming years, NASA says votes will continue to be counted from across the solar system.

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