Contact: Jason Sorens, President, Free State Project (828) 225-1951
info@freestateproject.org
Elizabeth McKinstry, Vice President, Free State Project
Contact: Alan R. Weiss, ECL/Synchromesh Computing 512-219-0302
aweiss@austin.rr.com

P R E S S   R E L E A S E
For Immediate Release

ECL/Synchromesh Computing Certifies Free State Project Vote Count

Software, Analysis, Benchmarking, and Certification Company Verifies Vote and Ballots

Verifies that New Hampshire Wins by 251 Votes Over Wyoming

Austin, TX - October 1, 2003 - ECL and its parent company, Synchromesh Computing announced today that it has certified the Free State Project (FSP) balloting process and vote count, and supports the announcement by the FSP that the winner is New Hampshire.

ECL/Synchromesh Computing created a Certified Process to assure a fair, honest, repeatable, auditable, and safe vote so that the will of the FSP members could be fully registered. ECL/Synchromesh Computing was then asked to actually perform the vote counting, forward all donations to the FSP (over $13,000 donated), and of course verify the vote count.

The final ranking of the 10 states is:

1. New Hampshire
2. Wyoming
3. Montana
4. Idaho
5. Alaska
6. Maine
7. Vermont
8. Delaware
9. South Dakota
10. North Dakota

State	AK	DE	ID	MT	ND	NH	ME	SD	VT	WY
# of 1st's	253	284	238	242	24	749	118	32	97	498
# of 2nd's	250	231	247	391	38	341	257	79	241	326

The Winner is clearly New Hampshire. In fact, New Hampshire received 251 more first place votes, and 15 more 2nd place votes, than runner-up Wyoming. As FSP Founder and President Jason Sorens said, "not only that, preferences are very stable and "well-behaved": not only is there a Condorcet winner over the entire 10 candidates, but if you eliminate the Condorcet winner sequentially, there is a Condorcet winner at each iteration."

The Free State Project is a non-profit organization that is in the process of gathering 20,000 or more liberty-oriented people to move to a single state in the U.S. in the attempt to establish a truly free society.

"Its actually an interesting problem: how do you assure that a healthy, contentious, very public vote of a private organization dedicated to liberty and freedom goes smoothly? How do you make sure that all the votes are counted according to a publicly-available process, that the votes are counted fairly and honestly, and that the entire process can be certifiable (that is to say, repeatable and trustworthy)? Can you establish the creation of free-market solutions to what was previously the purview of Government (often-times poorly), counting votes?", said ECL and Synchromesh Computing Chairman and CEO Alan R. Weiss.

"We decided that our experience in certifying microprocessors, digital signal processors, and micrcontrollers as well as a operating systems and software tools was completely applicable to a public vote. As the certification company for an industry-standard consortium of almost 60 semiconductor and software companies, all ardent competitors to each other, we have the sort of background you need to be able to create certifiable processes. With a rigorous background in engineering, a charter and mission explicitly stating fairness and honesty, trustworthiness and equality of treatment, ECL has successfully certified hundreds of benchmark scores. In the semiconductor industry, the results of benchmarking can, at times, be worth literally hundreds of millions of dollars in sales, so a lack of guile is considered necessary, to say the least. Companies, and individuals, trust ECL, and for our part we have never had our fairness questioned or in dispute", explained Weiss.

The final results and an analysis of voting patterns can be found in the Free State Project Vote Count, Certification Process, and Results White Paper.

ECL is the leader in embedded benchmarking, certification and software engineering. ECL certifies the benchmark and performance scores for the embedded processor and compiler industries, and has recently expanded into vote and ballot certification. ECL has certified hundreds of such scores, and is known for its fairness, honesty, and lack of bias as well as its abilities to create certification processes that result in repeatability, confidence and trust. Founded in 1998 at the request of the entire embedded semiconductor industry to perform benchmark certifications for EEMBC (http://www.eembc.org), has grown to become the worldwide leader in processor, architecture, software, and systems benchmarking and certification. ECL also provides certifications on other processes and procedures. ECL's clients include the top 60 semiconductor and software companies, as well as industry consortia. ECL, LLC, with offices in Austin, Texas and Northern California, serves clients in the USA, United Kingdom, Europe, Japan, and Korea. Synchromesh Computing is an organization set up to provide Vote Counting, Balloting, Vote Certification, and Engineering Services and will inherit those services from ECL, which will focus exclusively on benchmarking and benchmark certification.

Synchromesh Computing can be found on the Web at http://www.synchromeshcomputing.com/

ECL, LLC can be found on the Web at http://www.ebenchmarks.com/

The Free State Project can be found on the Web at http://www.freestateproject.org/