Most of the 2,400 bleacher seats available were sold out by 9:15 a.m., 15 minutes after they went on sale via the Internet. The tickets sold for $40 apiece.
Ninety-nine percent of the tickets were sold to Montana residents, with each person buying an average of 3.8 tickets.
“I was really disappointed,” Cynthia Forsch of St. Ignatius said in a telephone interview. “I was right there at 9 a.m. I had the site open. Right at 9, I touched the bar. I went to the bar saying tickets on sale. It wouldn't go to the Web site. I kept going back and forth from 9 to 9:40 a.m. I tried calling. It was busy. I tried to fax the order. There was no answer. So there was no way to get them.”
Forsch finally got into the online system at 9:42 a.m. and entered her credit card number. She was quickly informed that the tickets were sold out.
“I've never wanted something so badly,” said Forsch, an environmental consultant. “Hillary is my hero. I'm of a certain age. I want a woman as president.”
Democratic Party spokesman Kevin O'Brien said the online ordering system worked exactly the way it was supposed to.
“The only flaw with the system is the Butte Civic Center isn't big enough,” O'Brien said. “We just have way more folks looking for tickets than are available.”
Contrary to some reports, 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.”
He said the online system marked the order in which people got in.
He said the Web site had 10,000 different “hits” from people trying to get into the computer system. That doesn't mean 10,000 different potential buyers tried to purchase tickets online. If someone tried multiple times, each time would be counted separately toward that total.
“It's like a lot of gasoline being poured into a funnel,” O'Brien said. “It takes some time for all of it to come down.”
O'Brien said the Democratic Party headquarters fielded plenty of phone calls from people wondering why they weren't able to obtain tickets.
When they learned how great the demand was, “they were very understanding,” he said.
O'Brien said the Butte Civic Center will be packed to capacity with a crowd topping 4,000 - or more than five times as many as the party's annual Mansfield-Metcalf dinner in Helena usually draws. This is the first time one presidential candidate, much less two, has come to the party's big event.
The 1,000 seats on the Civic Center's gym floor, which come with a sit-down meal, sold out earlier. The 2,400 people in the bleachers will get box dinners. The remaining seats are set aside for disabled people and national and local media. O'Brien said Clinton and Obama each have about 100 national reporters, photographers and camera and sound people accompanying them.
|
 |
 |
Add your comment now! Write your comment in the form below.
(Email address is for verification only. If you'd like to email a story, look for the link above)