If the Montana Democratic Party cannot sell tickets to a popular event efficiently and fairly, a simple exercise compared to running a major campaign, how can it expect to win elections?
Yesterday, 2,400 tickets for “bleacher seats” for the 5 April 2008 Democratic dinner in Butte at which Senators Obama and Clinton will speak went on sale online at 0900. According to a story by Charles Johnson in the Missoulian, and email notes I received from local Democrats, virtually all of the $40 tickets were sold out 15 minutes later.
A Kalispell Democrat told me:
At 8:57, I was poised and ready to go, refreshing the state Demo site every few seconds. At 9:00 the screen did its thing and shifted to an info page asking for name, address, credit card account, blah blah. I quickly entered my info, requesting 6 tickets and submitted it at 9:01. The site crashed at that point, less than a minute into the whole thing.
I refreshed my screen every 30 seconds or so from that point on, continuing to request my ticket order, and getting various error messages; then at 9:40, they announced they were sold out.
The Democrat Party claims the system didn’t crash. According to Johnson’s story:
Contrary to some reports, [Democratic spokesman Kevin] O’Brien said there was no crash on the party’s computer server or that of the third-party contractor that handled the credit-card ticket sales, Political CFOs of Alexandria, Va.
“It never crashed at our end,” he said. “We thought it did at one point. It never crashed at the other end. The system worked exactly like it was supposed to. A certain amount of folks could get into the queue. They sold in 15 minutes.”
If that’s how the system was supposed to work, the people who decided to use it should be fired. It should have been obvious that there would be thousands, probably tens of thousands, of people trying to buy tickets to hear Obama and Clinton; that there would be a shortage of ticket. Even the drunk at the end of the bar would know that much.
Update. O’Brien is equivocating. The server could handle only X number of connections, but probably ten-X ticket seekers were attempting to connect. Those who could not connect received error messages when the server shed the attempted connection. To those trying to connect, this is a crash. To the IT crew, it’s a case of the system functioning as intended. The real issue is that Montana’s Democrats chose the wrong system to sell the tickets. O’Brien should have said, “Technically, the system didn’t crash, but for those trying to buy tickets, that’s a distinction without difference. It was the wrong system to use. We made a mistake and we apologize.” Instead, he consulted the George W. Bush public relations manual and denied that anything was amiss.
When tickets are that scarce, a lottery is the only fair way to allocate the limited supply. The online ticket office should have been kept open for 24 hours, with all applications being accepted on a conditional basis. After the queue closed, the tickets could have been distributed by a fair and random drawing.
That’s not complicated. Or expensive. Lotteries are not new to Montana. The process is used to allocate hunting licenses, for example. And there is even a state lottery — official gambling; nothing to be proud of; but a fact proving that random processes are known to Montanans; known even to Democrats; except, it appears, the Democrats who arrange for ticket sales to speeches by presidential candidates.