"The best part of voting from the ISS," per astronaut Leroy Chiao? "No lines!"

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Chiao, Expedition 10 mission commander, gives a "thumbs up" on the way to the launch pad in Kazakhstan on October 13, 2004. (NASA/Bill Ingalls)




From there, Chiao cast his vote electronically. And he used the same secure email connection to send his ballot back to Earth.

As Chiao told me in an email, he sent his ballot directly to the appropriate official at the county clerk's office. And "that official had the password and recorded my ballot. So, there is one person who knows how I voted in that election."

But the whole exercise, he makes clear, was worth it -- and, as he told me, "I appreciated all who made it possible to exercise my right, even though I was in orbit." As Chiao explained at the time: "Voting is each citizen's most basic yet most powerful tool for participating in America's cherished right to choose its leaders."

So what did it feel like to exercise that right from outside of Earth? Even in an environment as pragmatic as a terrestrial polling place, after all, there's something powerful in casting a vote -- whether the casting is accomplished through a pulled lever or a punched card or a touched screen. You're communing with your country and your history. You're making a statement about who you are and who you want to become. What's it like to experience that participation so far from, and yet so close to, home?

In a word: awesome. "It felt good to vote from space," Chiao says, "to be an example of how one could exercise that right even from 250 miles up!"

And there's one other benefit to voting from zero gravity, Chiao points out -- one that, given the lag times terrestrial voters so often experience, is a big one. "The best part of voting from the ISS?" he says. "No lines!"