Free State Project picks New Hampshire

1. Group aims to recruit 20,000 liberty-minded individuals to move
2. Membership vote selects NH out of ten candidates for planned migration
3. Free Staters hope to reinforce, enhance "sphere of individual liberty" in the Live Free or Die state
4. Project has earned backing of NH governor, some state legislators
5. Trickle of early movers expected to start this year

Aiming to preserve one bastion of freedom in the age of intrusive government, members of the rapidly growing Free State Project (FSP) have made a crucial decision. Voting via mail-in ballot after months of feisty debate, Free Staters chose New Hampshire as their future home.

Founded in 2001, the FSP's goal is to concentrate 20,000 liberty-oriented voters in one state. There, it is hoped, they will work to enhance and extend its existing culture of liberty. But until this week, it was anyone's guess whether that state would be Montana, Wyoming, Delaware, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota, or Alaska.

The membership election took place through the innovative Condorcet's Method, which allowed voters to rank all states and selected the state that received a higher ranking than each other state from a majority of voters. The runner-up state was Wyoming, which defeated every other state but fell to New Hampshire by the decisive margin of 55 per cent to 45 per cent.

"New Hampshire is clearly the consensus choice of Free Staters," commented FSP President and Yale political science professor Jason Sorens. "New Hampshire won a plurality of first-preference votes from every region of the country except the West."

"It's not difficult to see the reasons for New Hampshire's victory," adds Vice-President Elizabeth McKinstry, who is originally from New England. "The state boasts the lowest state and local tax burden in the continental U.S., the leanest state government in the country in terms of government spending and employment, a citizen legislature, a healthy job market, and perhaps most important, local support for our movement."

Over 100 New Hampshire residents have signed up for the Free State Project already, willing to move elsewhere but hoping to bring the movement to their home state. Governor Craig Benson even pledged to support the aims of the FSP, and several members of the legislature have signed up as members.

UPDATE(10/9/2003 10:02pm)
Claremont is the first target:

The Libertarian Party has chosen Claremont as the major municipality in which to focus its Free State Project, the chairman of the state party said.

The plan is to have some 20,000 people sign up to move to New Hampshire by 2006 and to have those people actually move to the state within the next five years, John Babiarz said.

Claremont was chosen as the primary city because of its relatively small size and its potential for economic growth, Babiarz said.

"We think that Claremont has an undervalued economy and we like to look at things in the long term," he added. "Cities like Manchester, Nashua and Portsmouth might be too big for us to really make a difference. But Claremont is smaller, so we would not be drowned out."