Indian-American astronaut Sunita Williams, currently in space floating around in zero-gravity, voted for US presidential polls by absentee ballot. Sunita, along with flight engineer Kevin Ford, exercised her franchise in July while stationed in Russia even before heading up to the station aboard Soyuz ships launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome.

The other four members of the station's current Expedition 33 crew are all non-Americans -- three Russian cosmonauts and one Japanese space ace. For several years now, adventurers aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have been able to cast their votes via encrypted e-mail. Voting facility is available to those in the ISS with the help of to a digital ballot provided by Mission Control at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The provision was envisaged by a 1997 Bill passed in the state of Texas, home to most of the NASA astronauts. The Bill allowed registered voters to digitally beam their ballots back down to Houston.