Web site for green-card lottery swamped by registrations

A State Dept. spokeswoman said applicants should have filed sooner

By Linda Rosencrance

January 2, 2004 12:00 PM ET

Computerworld - The U.S. State Department's online lottery site for green cards was swamped earlier this week when thousands of immigrants tried to file their applications at the last minute. The deadline to register for the first online-only lottery was midnight on Dec. 30.
"This really wasn't an issue," Kelly Shannon, a State Department spokeswoman, said today. "The only time we had our full server capacity utilized was Monday and Tuesday, during the last two days. In the last three days of registration, we had over 800,000 registrations received."
Despite the fact that many people wait until the last minute to register, it didn't make sense to add more servers during the last week leading up to the deadline, Shannon said.
"Last year, maybe people sent [their paper applications] in [at] an appropriate amount of time to their way of thinking, but the package didn't arrive in the U.S. in time to arrive at the State Department before midnight on the day the lottery closed," she said.
In addition, Shannon said, applicants had only one month to register in 2002. In 2003, they had two full months to do so. "If they waited until the last two days, it was their own decision to wait," Shannon said. "They had two months to get online to do this."
The 2003 lottery ran from Nov. 1 to midnight Dec. 30, she said. In past years, it ran from the beginning of October to the beginning of November.
"This year [2003], almost 6 million people submitted their applications online," she said. "We only have 50,000 green cards to give out."
Shannon said approximately 10 million people registered for the lottery in 2002. Of those, about 2.9 million applications were disqualified, while some 7.2 million were accepted.
She also said that the directions for this year's online-only application were easier to follow than were those for the paper-based application.
"If the fields were not fully filled out, you couldn't submit a registration online," she said. "With the paper system, if you didn't fill everything in, you were disqualified automatically."

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