Interesting article in The Miami Hurricane, the UM student newspaper: Lottery for Romney, Obama events causes controversy.
Students were originally promised a lottery for a portion of the seats for Mitt Romney’s Univision interview here tomorrow. It seems, though, that all of the very small number of tickets will be distributed by various, mostly friendly, groups. The student journalists were not able to pin down who ordered the change — the Romney campaign or Univision.
On Friday, the Division of Student Affairs sent an email to students who entered the lottery for Gov. Romney’s event on Wednesday, informing them that there would no longer be a lottery to distribute tickets to the event.
The event, as per the Romney campaign’s request, was only open to members of the UM College Republicans and presidents of certain organizations, such as the Federacion de Estudiantes Cubanos (the Federation of Cuban Students, known as FEC) and SpectrUM, the LGBT student organization on campus. FEC, for instance, will receive nine tickets for its entire executive board.
Though the local Romney office and the Florida communications director for the campaign were given the opportunity to comment on the campaign’s decision, they did not respond to phone calls and emails.
Of the 750 total tickets, UM was originally given roughly 400, with 99 percent of those tickets going to students, according to Rudy Fernandez, vice president for government affairs. Student Affairs has been responsible for distributing the tickets according to the rules imposed by each campaign and by Univision, who rented the BankUnited Center Fieldhouse where the events will be held.
The same room is being used for the Obama event, but the Hurricane reports that the student lottery for some of the tickets to that event is still going forward.
Update (9/19/12): Huffington Post has loads more details, and says both campaigns are basically doing the same thing.
