Winners of the lottery for tickets to the upcoming Presidential Candidate Town Meeting will be notified throughout this week, according to Linda Fowler, director of the Rockefeller Center.
Some winners were notified yesterday, while the rest will be contacted through a letter in their Hinman Boxes, Fowler said.
A total of 495 people were selected to view the "First in the Nation" Town Meeting in person each night. The total number of people who applied to see the meeting was not released.
The lottery was done in three separate lots, Fowler said. The three stages determined who would be on the stage, in the balcony above the stage, and in the main audience.
The main audience will mostly contain residents of Hanover, and students and faculty that are residents of New Hampshire. Only those audience members will have to chance to submit questions to the candidates. Aside from New Hampshire residents, there will be seats reserved in the rear of the theater for the people who have worked on the event, Fowler said.
A group of 80 people, composed of the members of the Dartmouth community, will be on the stage about ten feet away from the candidates each night. The group will consist of about 40 students and 40 faculty members.
The people who were selected to be on stage have already been notified for security reasons, Fowler said. "We need to see the kinds of people who will be on the stage and get their social security numbers, in case the Secret Service wants to know."
The balcony will hold 129 people, who will be notified during this week. Some seats in the balcony will be reserved for the various campaign officials.
Aside from the seats in the balcony, a number of seats have been reserved in the main section for the wives of the candidates, President Wright and his wife, major elected officials from the state of New Hampshire, and members of the Student Assembly.
Although Fowler would not comment on the total number of people who applied, she did note there were "a lot more applications for the Democrat event, primarily because this is the first time that Gore and Bradley will be debating one-on-one, and also because Bush will not be attending the Republican event."
"It was a lot easier for us to accommodate people on the Republican side," Fowler said. "Many more people indicated to us that they were Republicans, but they still wanted to attend the Democrat meeting."
The media, with the exception of CNN, who is broadcasting the event, and The Dartmouth, will be in Alumni Hall instead of the main theater, Fowler said. "The Public Affairs Office has installed more than 200 phones and credentialed around 150 people from the media, some of whom are from the major networks."
Fowler said that security will be tight, especially for the people on stage, as the candidates may decide to meet members of the audience after the meeting.
It is still unclear what the candidates will do after the meeting is over. "We are talking to the campaign workers and trying to figure out what Bradley will do after the event," Arun Palakurthy '02, one of the student coordinators for the Bradley campaign at Dartmouth, said.
Palakurthy also noted that student campaign workers like himself were not guaranteed seats and had to enter the lottery like everyone else.
Immediately preceding the event, a pool of photographers will be given the opportunity to take pictures of the candidates.
