July 03, 2020

Voting From Space


Voting From Space
Voting from the ISS is now possible. Image by NASA via flickr

Russians are going to the polls to vote on changes to the Russian constitution. But not everyone can make it in person – online voting is a popular variant, and one man is making history. The Russian astronaut Anatoly Ivanishin was reputedly the first person in the world to vote online from space.

Ivanishin is currently onboard the International Space Station (ISS). He was able to vote online, since he has permanent residential registration in Moscow. Way to keep your documents up to date, even from space!

One other Russian astronaut, Ivan Wagner, will also cast his vote from the ISS. Unlike his colleague Ivanishin, however, Wagner’s vote will be made via proxy – Wagner will communicate his vote to the proxy via a secured connection, and the proxy will cast the actual ballot.

Voting on amendments to the constitution took place in Russia from June 25 through July 1. Among the several contentious questions is whether Vladimir Putin will be allowed to run for president again.

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This gripping autobiography plays out against the backdrop of Russia's bloody Civil War, and was one of the first Western eyewitness accounts of life in post-revolutionary Russia. Marooned in Moscow provides a fascinating account of one woman's entry into war-torn Russia in early 1920, first-person impressions of many in the top Soviet leadership, and accounts of the author's increasingly dangerous work as a journalist and spy, to say nothing of her work on behalf of prisoners, her two arrests, and her eventual ten-month-long imprisonment, including in the infamous Lubyanka prison. It is a veritable encyclopedia of life in Russia in the early 1920s.

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