By Charles L. Westmoreland

During the distribution of Final Four tickets to students last week, a controversy built up over a last minute change in procedure.

The task to find a fair way to distribute the tickets was handed down from the University of Louisville to members of the Student Government Association. From the get-go, students expressed concern over the lottery and the method of payment, which were conducted over e-mail.

An hour before the lottery began, the e-mail address posted on ULink telling students how to enter their names in the lottery was changed from finalfourtickets@yahoo.com to SGA Services Vice-President Justin Morehead’s e-mail address. The last-minute change disqualified some students who submitted their information to the wrong e-mail address. Morehead said the change was made at the request of students who did not feel comfortable with submitting their credit card number to a yahoo e-mail account.

“We had numerous security concerns from students who didn’t want to send their credit card info to the yahoo account and asked if they could send it to a Louisville e-mail account instead,” he said. “I was the contact, that’s why my e-mail was used.”

Morehead said that an automatic reply was sent to all those who submitted their information to the yahoo account, but for some students, it was too late.

“I set up my e-mail to send out my information at midnight,” said Logan Wood, a junior who was working third-shift at UPS when the lottery began. “I didn’t know [Morehead] changed the Web site … until the next morning. They said it was unsecured on Yahoo, but I think the U of L e-mail service would be just as unsecured.”

“I don’t think it was fair to change the e-mail without pushing the time back so people would know about the change,” said junior Heath Hawkins. “I think a lot of people missed out on tickets because of that.”

Morehead admitted that there were problems in how the lottery was held, but said that the university delegated the task to the SGA on Monday, leaving SGA officials with less than a day to concoct a plan.

“We only had a few hours to prepare, so to have a fair lottery this was the only semi-efficient way to do things,” he said.

Morehead said that about 500 e-mails were sent to the Yahoo account and that 350 of those students received the automated reply and then sent another message to his Louisville e-mail account.

Overall, Morehead said he received nearly 1,400 emails from students biding for the tickets, 225 of which came at the stroke of midnight when the lottery initially began. Morehead said the university had originally given the SGA 300 tickets that were sold at the subsidized rate of $30 each. After the lottery, the SGA was given an additional 100 tickets from the Athletic Department that the SGA distributed in another lottery on Thursday. Only those not selected in the first lottery were eligible. The first 100 students to reply were awarded the tickets for the full price of $130.

Some students cried foul play due to the fact that the SGA was delegated with the responsibility of distributing the tickets, but SGA President Ryan McKinley and Morehead both assured that the process was done as fairly as possible.

“After setting aside tickets for the first 100 e-mails sent in, all the other names were placed in a spreadsheet and we did a ‘random number function’ to select row numbers of those who would get the tickets,” Morehead said. “We did it by the book, I even offered for other office staff to sit with me while doing the lottery.”

McKinley admitted that the process could be improved, but that with limited time and staff, the SGA could only do so much.

“We didn’t have a contingency plan to do this, but it’s not a problem for us to handle something like this, we just need to have a plan ahead of time,” McKinley said. “For the Liberty Bowl we had a month to prepare. This time we had less than a day.”

McKinley said that next year’s SGA staff will be more ready to handle a return to the Final Four.

McKinley and Morehead both said they skipped class last Tuesday so they could spend all day making sure the lottery was conducted properly and that each student would have a fair chance.

“I want students to realize how much time we put into making the lottery as fair as possible,” Morehead said. “We didn’t play favorites.”