Miramar, Florida, 9/18/2006 – When they realized the time was right to settle down somewhere new and make a home for themselves, Danny de Zayas and Nina Barry greeted this unassuming situation with an extremely unusual response. The couple, ages 23 and 26 respectively, chose to turn the decision-making over to the billions of internet users worldwide. The two gathered their thoughts, scraped together some cash, and created a website—http://dannyandnina.com—where any visitor can cast a ballot for one of 250 towns across the continental United States, including Phoenix as well as Tempe, Scottsdale, Gilbert, and Glendale. Site users may vote as often as they like for any town on the list; once 1,000,000 votes have been tallied, the couple will move to the town with the highest number of votes. The site launched in mid-September, is 100% free, and requires no registration or personal information to vote.

In addition to voting for the town(s) of their choice, visitors to the site can also view real-time updates of how the voting is unfolding, learn more about what Danny and Nina are looking for in their new home, get to know a bit more about the couple’s interests, and discuss their own thoughts on the site’s forum. Danny and Nina are also maintaining a blog that chronicles their progress throughout the voting and will continue on after they have made it to their new, as of yet undetermined location.

Danny, who had the idea while in the shower, believes the timing for the site is opportune. “Beyond the fact that there never been something quite like this before,” Danny notes that “voting is such a big part of the American zeitgeist right now, from the pivotal political mid-term elections around the corner to the prevalence of balloting in pop culture phenomenons like American Idol.” Nina agrees, adding “the internet is an inherently democratic institution and we are the first generation to grow up alongside the web, so this is an idea that, while unprecedented, also makes a lot of sense.”

Danny de Zayas was born and raised in Miami, Florida and attended New York University. After graduating magna cum laude in three years, he ran the Marketing Department for online clothing retailer Neighborhoodies.com, eventually becoming Vice President. He was later promoted to President of their sister company, AmpCamp.com. Nina Barry was born in Moscow, Russia and raised in Boulder, Colorado. She obtained her undergraduate degree from the esteemed Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York before gaining her MFA from the New York Academy of Art. Her artwork has been showcased across the country, and many of her pieces may be viewed at her personal site: http://ninabarry.com.

...Hollywood representatives of the world's estimated 9.2 million refugees have launched a website where voters from around the globe can vote on homes for them. Voters can read about refugees' preferences--from basic shelter, to clean, potable water, to human dignity, to the rights of return--and then decide where would be the funnest place to imagine the world's refugees moving to while not actually doing anything about their dislocation, hunger, disease, and precarious survival!

Excluded from voting options, of course, are the refugees' native homes, which have been decimated by colonialism and its aftermath of civil war, economic exploitation, corruption, and neocolonial globalization practices.

"It's fuckin awesome!" says one American on the website's blog. "I mean, we get to imagine what it might sort of be like if wealth were, like, equally distributed, and not so grossly concentrated in the hands of a few rich assholes, so that these folks could actually choose not only where to live, but could live, period--only, not for real! The internet rules!"