So far, more than a million people from North Carolina have voted early in this year’s election.

Only one of those people cast a ballot from Antarctica.

A longtime follower (hi Gluten Morgan) flagged this tweet for me, which was originally inspired by political scientist, armadillo enthusiast, and Friend of the Rabbit Hole Chris Cooper. And yes, I double-checked it. It’s true. A vote came in (and was accepted) from the desolate frozen wasteland that sits at the bottom of the Earth.

I had questions. Like: Who is this voter? Is it hard to cast a ballot from Antarctica? How exactly does someone get from North Carolina to such an isolated outpost? Could I actually get in touch with him? Is it possible to set up a Zoom call at the end of the world?

Some enterprising reporter should seek him out. Might as well be me!

Finding this voter’s name wasn’t all that hard. The North Carolina State Board of Elections has an extremely long spreadsheet that it posts online, listing every voter who casts an absentee ballot. The overwhelming majority of those ballots are in-person early votes. But the list also includes mail-in votes, along with ballots that came in from overseas. Thus, when I searched for “Antarctica,” I got exactly one result: A 31-year-old man from Candler named Mitchell Huff who’s currently at McMurdo Station, the largest American research base on the continent. It sits on the southern tip of Ross Island, protruding into a permanently frozen sea.

Now here’s the thing. I’m not going to put someone’s name out there willy-nilly, even if it is public record. So I tried to get in touch with Mitchell. I reached out through LinkedIn, but got nothing. I fired off a few messages to email addresses that I thought might be his, but they all bounced back. And it’s not like I can go down there and poke around, or call people up and ask them if they can track someone down on my behalf. The place doesn’t have its own dedicated area code, and nobody seems to have a direct phone number there for incoming calls.

Hence, I reached out to the U.S. Antarctic Program’s media arm at the end of September, telling them I was interested in doing a story about voting from remote places, and specifically asking if I could talk to Mitchell. They told me they’d discuss it at their biweekly meeting in early October. But earlier this week they emailed me back, telling me that they “cannot accommodate it at this time.”

Moving on! Through more public records, I found that Mitchell’s address in Candler matched up with his parents’. So on Tuesday, I called up his father Paul at his office in an Airgas franchise in Asheville. Yes, Paul says, Mitchell is my son. And yes, he did vote from Antarctica: “It’s legit.”

Here in North Carolina, if you want to vote, you have a few options. You can go to an actual polling place in person. Or, you can request and return a mail-in ballot through the U.S. Postal Service. But if you’re overseas, how does that work? After all, sending letters back and forth from other countries is going to eat up a lot of time.

The U.S. Antarctic Program’s Participant Guide talks about how the postal service works down there. First off, it’s not super expensive to send letters back and forth—the research bases all have Air Force Post Office (APO) mailing addresses with domestic rates. You can use regular old stamps and everything! But all of the mail has to go through the USAP’s logistics hub in Christchurch, New Zealand, about 2,400 miles away, which means it also has to go through New Zealand customs. Which takes more time. The USAP recommends that nothing important (like bill payments and medication) be sent through the mail. And no, FedEx and UPS won’t deliver to Antarctica.

Hence, packages can take months to reach McMurdo Station or the U.S. Post Office at the South Pole, and that’s during the austral summer (remember, their summer is our winter, and vice versa). Stuff sent during the dark winter months may not make it at all. By those standards, the good news (?) is that flat mail like letters and, ostensibly, ballots, will take a mere two or three weeks to make it from the United States to Antarctica. That said, Board of Elections records said Mitchell Huff received his ballot on September 4th, on the same day they were mailed out to others across the state. He returned it five days later, on September 9th. How is that possible?

Well it’s possible because Huff didn’t use the mail at all. For this part, I contacted the grand poobah of all things voting in North Carolina, Gerry Cohen. He’s currently a member of the Wake County Board of Elections, and a long time special counsel to the North Carolina General Assembly. It turns out that overseas voters don’t have to deal with the mail if they don’t want to. Cohen says the records show that Huff applied for an overseas ballot electronically on June 1. And while the database doesn’t say how a ballot was returned, the Buncombe County Board of Elections confirmed that they did receive Huff’s ballot electronically. (“We have residents voting from all over the world!” a staffer said joyfully at the end of his reply.)

Voting electronically isn’t something you can generally do in the United States, but it’s been possible for Americans overseas for a long time. In 1986, President Reagan signed the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) into law, making it possible for military members and other U.S. citizens to vote from abroad. Later, programs allowed overseas voters to return their ballots by fax, email, and through a special online voting portal. That means the only North Carolinians who can vote electronically are the ones who aren’t currently in this country, along with a small group of people with disabilities.

You can email your ballot in, but it’s kind of a pain. “If you use email you have to print stuff out, mark it, scan it, and send it back. Through the portal, it’s all online. You can do it on your phone or laptop or desktop. No printing anything out,” Cohen tells me. “Most UOCAVA voters use the portal. You can do it all on your cell phone.”

Hence, we don’t know exactly how Huff voted, but we have a very good guess. “I will say in Wake County from personally handling 300 returned UOCAVA ballots, only two came back snail mail,” Cohen says. “In any case, if he applied electronically he wouldn’t have even gotten an envelope to return it in!”

All of this is to say that even thought you have to jump through some hoops (which includes submitting photo ID somehow), it is possible to vote from nearly anywhere. And Antarctica isn’t even the furthest place that North Carolinians have cast a ballot from this year—at least three people have voted from Perth, Australia, a city that’s more than 11,000 miles away and requires more than 30 hours in plane rides and layovers to reach. But if you are out of the country and if you make the right arrangements, then yes, you can pull out your phone, cast a ballot, and call it a day. Says Cohen: “It’s likely easier to vote from Antarctica than if you live in Charlotte.”

Of course, none of this addresses one big question I had: What is Huff doing in Antarctica? Unfortunately, there was no way for me to ask him directly. “We don’t have really good contact with him. We get phone calls. But their internet is spotty,” his father Paul told me. “The first year they had Starlink, and we could FaceTime him. That’s not really the case now.” Hence, Mitchell will call his folks whenever he’s back inside a building on his lunch break, which is usually around 8 p.m. Eastern. He always calls them. There’s not really a good way for Paul and his wife Michelle (or me) to place a call to Antarctica.

Hence, all I know is what Paul tells me. For one thing, he says Mitchell’s always been adventurous. He took flight lessons when he was 16. For a while, he was an over-the-road truck driver. Later, he found work on a fueling truck at the Asheville airport’s jet center.

So, how did he get a job in Antarctica? “He applied online,” Paul says. A contractor was looking for people to move fuel at McMurdo Station. “Everything there works on diesel,” Paul says, so Mitchell makes sure the gas gets where it needs to go. Often he’s working out on the ice sheet where the planes land.

Mitchell’s been down there for the last three austral summers. This year, he arrived at McMurdo in August, and is due to come home in February or March. He got there right before the sun came up and stayed up, and will leave around the time when it dips below the horizon for months. That doesn’t mean an Antarctic summer is warm. “At one point, the windchill was -170 degrees,” Paul says.

It’s isn’t all hard work in freezing temperatures, though. Last year, Mitchell rented a van and drove all around New Zealand. He’s hoping to get a chance to go to the South Pole this year, although it’s not a given. And the research base itself has around 1,000 people living and working there at this time of year. In the past, he’s met other North Carolinians down there, including a guy from Black Mountain. “There’s a real big social aspect to it,” Paul says. Sure, Antarctica is isolated. But you’re not there alone. “He enjoys it,” Paul says.

Even so, McMurdo Station is still a place unlike nearly any other place on Earth. “You’re always fighting the machinery,” Paul says. Creature comforts, like privacy, are highly valued. “Most things there are old, but they just built a new dorm and he got a private room,” Paul says. “That was exciting.”

And in the end, no matter where you are in the world, if you have a link to civilization, you can participate in an election. In 2024, the first year Mitchell went to Antarctica, he voted early before he left. This year, he made sure he was able to cast a ballot, even though he was on an icy spot of land more than 9,000 miles away from home. “He said specifically that he was able to vote,” Paul says. “He was excited.”