In a moment that drew a chuckle on both sides of the political aisle, the first batch of tickets sent out for tonight’s State of the Union address were found to have not one, but two typos. Photos began surfacing Monday, primarily featuring the fact that the word Union in the event title had an unfortunate “m” replacing the “n” at the end of the word.
“Looking forward to tomorrow’s State of the Uniom.” tweeted Sen. Marco Rubio (R, Fla).
“This will be the last year I go to a scalper for tickets to the ‘State of the Uniom,'” Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi (D, Ill.) joked, tweeting the photo used in the headline for this post.
Rep. Raul M. Grijalva, a democrat who represents Arizona’s 3rd district, went a little sharper with his commentary, tweeting “Just received my ticket for the State of the Union. Looks like @BetsyDeVosEd was in charge of spell checking… #SOTUniom.” DeVos, the Education Secretary, has been a common target of democratic anger for her stances on public education and charter schools.
Once one delves deep into the Twitter world, the messaging gets a bit uglier from there, but ultimately it’s all (somewhat) in good fun.
The other error is a bit more subtle, but as Buzzfeed noted in its coverage, the ticket refers to the seat location as being in the “Visitor’s Gallery” while it should read “Visitors'” instead. According to a post on Glamour.com, the Office of the Sergeant at Arms and Doorkeeper will need to reprint and reissue every ticket to ensure that the right information is provided. Presumably the error was less of a laughing matter for people within those doors, who probably had a busy last 36 hours leading up to tonight’s address by President Trump.
According to a Sergeant at Arms spokesperson, this is likely the first time State of the Union tickets have had to be reissued. “Sometimes the colors and little details change and obviously the dates,” he told Buzzfeed. “But I don’t recall [the need to reprint due to an error] happening before.”
