DENVER—A lottery designed to be the climax of a months-long competition for protest sites during the Democratic National Convention ended without a jackpot Tuesday.
City officials postponed the drawing and ordered a do-over after organizations bidding for the right to use 14 parks in the downtown area pointed out mistakes in the process.
A new drawing is scheduled for Thursday.
City officials planned to award the right to apply for permits by putting cards bearing the names of interested applicants into a box and randomly drawing the winners.
But as city officials began drawing names for Civic Center—a prominent park between the Denver City and County Building and the Colorado Capitol—at least two organizations noticed problems.
Members of the group Recreate 68, a local group that has set itself up as an umbrella for protest organizations, and the anti-abortion group Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust noticed they did not have cards for the drawing on days they applied for.
Denver’s liaison for the convention, Katherine Archuleta, said the city’s database listing the permit seekers appears to be accurate and that errors were made when names were transferred to cards for the drawing. She said the city would verify the database.
“We would like to take a look at all the applications once again and reissue all the lottery tickets so that everybody has the tickets they are entitled to,” she said.
“The process was designed to catch any glitches and it did exactly that,” she said.
The dispute added one more hitch into a contentious competition for access to public areas near the convention.
Denver worked for weeks to devise an equitable solution after at least one group threatened to sue. The city came up with a lottery to give major organizations and businesses the same chance of landing a permit as a grassroots club or a single person.
The applications that came to light Tuesday were dominated by several individuals from just three groups: Recreate 68, the Survivors and another anti-abortion group headed by Washington D.C.-based Rev. Patrick Mahoney.
Associates of Recreate 68 submitted several applications for every park on every day under names such as “Tent State University,” “Carnival for Participatory Government” and “1st Amendment Appreciation Service.”
Those applicants at times were in competition with several members of a family who submitted repeated applications for a prayer service.
Glenn Spagnuolo, a Recreate 68 organizer, said city officials asked him Monday to “call off the dogs” and pull some applications from group members.
“I don’t have that authority,” Spagnuolo said. “What do they want me to do, call people up and say, ‘Sorry, the city would like me to tell you to give up your right to a permit application?'”
