The Green Card lottery has attracted less than half the usual number of applications this fiscal year, falling from 13 million to 5 million.  The decline is due to the fact that for the first time applications are being accepted by computer only.  Government officials say duplications and fraud have been curtailed, but immigrants and their advocates say the falloff results from a fear of giving information to the government online, lack of access to computers, new opportunities for immigrants to be defrauded and a serious lack of server capacity in the lottery’s final days that alone may have kept a million people from applying.

The lottery is open only to those from countries that have sent fewer than 50,000 people to the United States in the past five years.  From millions of applicants, the State Department randomly selects about 110,000 winners, and sends them invitations to apply for a visa at the closest consular office.  About half of the applicants fail to complete the process in time or are disqualified.  The supply of diversity visas goes to the rest on a first-come, first served basis.

Some people lack access to the tools needed to apply, such as a digital photo scanner, a computer and an Internet connection.  Some immigrants already in the US fear that leaving a computer trail could make them targets for deportation.  Hundreds of thousands of immigrants who thought that they were applying for the lottery were tricked by official looking websites run by a Fort Lauderdale couple that fraudulently collected fees for Internet lottery applications that were never submitted.

Despite calls by immigration advocacy groups to extend the deadline, the DOS indicated that it had no plans to alter its procedures this year.

In the final days of the lottery, State Department servers locked out the vast majority of applicants. An estimated 900,000 applications were not accepted because DOS servers were overwhelmed. The State Department did not apologize for its failure to handle the applications. Instead, a State Department spokesman criticized applicants for waiting until the end. Critics of the State Department countered that given 15 years of history, the State Department should have known that there is always a massive surge of applications in the lottery’s final days. The DOS should have foreseen the surge and either planned properly to have adequate server capacity or warned applicants that they might not be able to submit an application in the lottery’s final days.