Charging a nominal fee to enter the raffle might. Like how all raffles work by definition.

Just make the ticket personal and non-transferable. No need to disadvantage the poor to make it 'fair'.

Glastonbury Festival does non-transferable by having a long period to register interest and upload a photo of yourself, then if you snag a ticket your photo gets printed on it and checked at the entrance.

Their primary problem was resellers - it's still a scramble when the ticket sale begins.

Good to fight against resellers but bad for normal users - some people might get sick, or have something else come up, and not being able to give a ticket to a friend is a bad experience.

OTOH since this scheme eliminates scalpers tickets may be significantly cheaper, which is a good experience. I imagine it is a net positive.

True. But the scalper problem was so large before that they didn't have a better option.

Glastonbury will refund the ticket minus an administration fee if you genuinely can't go because of circumstances beyond your control.

https://glastonburyfestivals.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/0...

Why should your friend get to go rather than someone who has been waiting all that time?

That might help a little but rich people will just eat the cost of thousands of fees.

IF the money was going to maintain the park, then "$10 for a chance to get in, or $10,000 to buy your way in" sounds relatively unobjectionable. It's not like the current Congress is likely to raise taxes on the rich.

Compared to how it is now, it would be better, which is a low bar.

But perfect is the enemy of good, so if a price tag $10,000 meant some rich bought their way in and a good chunk of normal people got in anyway, that's effectively a tax on rich people, so I'm for it. (Of course, you'd spin it differently so rich people can pose as doing something for the environment and whatnot.)

Yep. "Special VIP access for Mount Gibbs tier and higher-tier 'Yosemite Club' Members...exclusive events...". The usual classy-looking plaques & such around the park, informing mere mortals of the names of the park's uber-green benefactors.

Side benefit - when Congress is doing its annual budget fight, the National Parks Service can remind certain members that lots of donation-giving wealthy people care a lot about the National Parks.

Of course, lots of private and non-profit organizations have memberships, subscriptions, VIP tickets that let bigger spenders at least cut in line. It seems a bit more distasteful when the government does it though, of course, it happens in all sorts of more subtle ways. Generally speaking, so long as the general public still has reasonable access, it seems mostly harmless so long as the incremental funds go to the organization.

That's covered in the article.

Why not just make it a reverse auction at that point? That’s the end state anyway

This happens for material things all the time (collectibles, snickers, limited edition of anything) but in case of experiences (concerts, access to trails) the id verification at entry is a good mechanism to defend against it.