Blaha's orbital disenfranchisement galvanized officials on the ground. "That was the defining moment," Susan Anderson said. "He got asked, 'Were you able to vote in space?'… There was no process for him to be able to vote."

NASA sprung into action, with Anderson leading a team that worked with Texas lawmakers (most astronauts live in the Houston area) to give astronauts a loophole. "They needed the chance to be able to vote if they chose to," she said. "[Lawmakers] were on board with it.… They helped push a bill through that said that we could accept an encrypted file from the space station."

Then-Governor George W. Bush signed the bill into law, and a year later, David Wolf became the first astronaut to cast a vote from space. Since then, most election years have seen a ballot or two beamed down from Americans in orbit, and the clerks in Harris or Galveston counties have dutifully tallied the result.

"It's a PDF of the ballot that we send to them," said Harris County Clerk Stan Stanart. "It's the same ballot than anyone would get by mail." The astronauts get the ballot in email form, sent in an encoded document that only they and the clerk can open. Once they send in their vote, the clerk hand-copies their selection and submits a standard ballot as a proxy.

"Even in the small elections, people will participate," Stanart said. "They're making a statement that voting is important to them."

Leroy Chiao, who voted from ISS in the 2004 presidential election, echoed that sentiment. "Part of being an astronaut is trying to serve as a good example, so the more we can do to encourage citizens to go out and vote, the better off we'll be," he said. "If this guy can vote from space, I ought to go down to my local polling place."

Chiao even cut a public service announcement urging Americans down below to get out and vote.

Two years later, Michael Lopez-Alegria cast his space ballot in the 2006 midterms. "It says a lot about the importance that we give to the democratic process in this country," he said. "It's not necessarily easy to make that happen. They had to have a law passed; they went to great lengths."

NASA spokesman Dan Huot said all the credit belongs to the astronauts. "It does speak volumes to their commitment to not just their mission but to the greater mission that we're all partaking in as U.S. citizens," he said.

Astronauts don't wait until Election Day to become engaged voters either. While ISS didn't have real-time Internet until recently, past astronauts were able to request their favorite news sources, which would be uploaded on a delay. Anderson read the Houston Chronicle and a local newspaper in League City, Texas, and he spent his workouts watching NBC Nightly News.

Lopez-Alegria would spend his treadmill time watching The PBS NewsHour.

"We didn't have Internet access, so we couldn't go look at the news, but we would get news summaries sent up to us," Chiao said. "We were able to keep up pretty well."