Tickets to President-elect Barack Obama's inauguration are free - if you can get them. The demand is great, but organizers of the Jan. 20 event are cautioning people to be careful about offers to sell tickets.
Tickets to the 56th inaugural ceremonies are distributed only through the offices of congressional representatives.
“Any Web site or ticket broker claiming that they have inaugural tickets is simply not telling the truth,” Howard Gantman, staff director of the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, states on the inauguration's official Web site.
Rep. Lois Capps of Santa Barbara, representing California's 23rd District, announced Friday that her office would use a lottery system to distribute her allotment of tickets.
People interested in attending the inauguration have been encouraged to sign up at the Web site www.house.gov/capps. The deadline to request tickets from Capps' office is 5 p.m. Friday, Nov. 21. Capps' office will notify constituents who have been selected to receive a ticket by the first week of December.
Each member of the House of Representatives, including Capps and Rep. Elton Gallegly, of California's 24th District, will receive 198 inauguration tickets to distribute for the event.
Gallegly's office in Thousand Oaks did not have information Friday afternoon about how his allocation would be dispersed.
California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the JCCIC, praised eBay and similar online sites for their decisions not to accept auctions for inauguration tickets.
Neither Feinstein nor Barbara Boxer, California's other senator, released information last week regarding how they would be dispersing their tickets, though Feinstein warned on her site that the requests have already outnumbered potential tickets.
The JCCIC has estimated that as many as 2 million people will be attending the inauguration and related events in Washington, D.C.
For more information and for links to contact information about congressional representatives, visit the 2009 Presidential Inaugural Ceremony Web site, http://inaugural.senate.gov/.
November 16, 2008
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