Posted on 05/15/2019 5:27:44 AM PDT by vannrox
Lawrence Mower of the Palm Beach Post in 2014 filed a public records request for 20 years of data on Florida Lottery winners.
After analyzing the data, he found something unusual: A small number of lottery players were winning hundreds of times at almost inconceivably long odds. A statistician compared one frequent winner’s feat to picking one star out of 50 galaxies and “then having your friend guess the same star on the first try.”
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Mower’s subsequent exposé led to fraud investigations and major reforms in the Florida Lottery. His reporting found, among other things, that some players were “cashing” tickets for other players to help them avoid paying debts and taxes that would be deducted from their winnings.
Intrigued, we wanted to chart new territory: to find out whether these repeat winning patterns exist across the country. We decided to submit public records requests in every state with a lottery—an adventure in itself given that FOIA laws vary significantly by state. In all, we sent more than 100 public record requests to lotteries for information about their winners, game odds, and investigative reports. Getting those records wasn’t simple, as we outline below.
But first, a quick rundown of our findings: In total, we analyzed 11 million lottery prize claim records covering 36 of the nation’s 45 lotteries. What we found astonished us:
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While our information requests were nearly identical, they were handled very differently by different states. So, we’ve put together some awards to shine a light on just how much FOIA laws vary across America:
The Service with a Smile Award goes to Oregon and Florida, which sent a downloadable link and a CD, respectively, within hours of our request.
Honorable mentions: Missouri, DC, Idaho, Texas, South Dakota, Indiana, Iowa, and Louisiana.
The It’s Better than Nothing Award goes to South Carolina. We discovered that the Palmetto State—alongside Delaware, Kansas, Maryland, Wyoming and North Dakota—allows lottery winners to remain anonymous, rendering its data impossible to analyze.
After discovering this, we dropped our original request and asked the agency if it could just provide a tally of tickets claimed by the state’s most frequent winners, including their home cities but with names redacted. The agency provided the data promptly.
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The You Really Have to Live There Award goes to Arkansas and Tennessee. Each of these states said requesters of public records must be a resident of the state to submit a request. Fortunately, we were able to reach out to two reporters with state residency who filed the requests on our behalf.
The Help From Above Award goes to Colorado. In March, the state lottery told us it would take at least 200 hours to process our request at a cost of $6,000.
This summer, by chance, the Colorado Legislature passed a law that required public agencies to more readily provide data upon request. In July, when we resubmitted our request, the Colorado Lottery knocked its fee down to $450. After some additional negotiation, the agency finally provided the data for free.
The Come and Get it Award goes to New Hampshire, whose representative said we could come to her office and get the records, which were kept in paper form. The woman said she was also willing to send us PDF, but not Excel, files because Excel files could “be manipulated.” We offered to post the original data when we published the project but she declined the offer.
Honorable mention: After surmounting the Tennessee Lottery’s initial objection that we weren’t state residents, the lottery insisted that reporters could only inspect prize claim records at its office in Nashville.
The Nobody’s Home Award goes to Maine, which did not respond to more than 35 calls over the course of four months. “I’ll respond soon,” one of the officials wrote on March 30. We never heard from him again.
The Better Late Than Never Award went to Georgia, which potentially violated state law by not answering our request for more than three months. It then took an additional three weeks for the lottery to go through a seven-step data verification process. The process was nearly complete when the lottery realized that some unauthorized information was about to reach us – beginning the whole process over again.
Honorable mention: After months of calls and emails without any response, the Minnesota Lottery agreed to finally provide the data we requested.
The We Didn’t Ask For That Award goes to Kentucky. The custodian of records declined to send us data about the odds for each game, but did send a 27-page document outlining the chronological history of the Kentucky Lottery.
The So This Is What It Takes? Award goes to New Mexico, which ignored and then denied our request for winners data. The lottery reversed its decision after a reporter sent an email requesting all emails between New Mexico Lottery employees about his original request. He also noted that he intended to file a complaint with the New Mexico Attorney General’s office.
Finally, the Send Me the Bill Award goes to Michigan, which told us that fulfilling our request would take approximately 2.5 million hours to complete and incur an “enormous” fee. We calculated it would take the agency a minimum of 285 years to fulfill our request.
After insisting the agency put its response in writing, a custodian sent an email a few days later stating he could pull the data for free in three days.
Our euphoria was short lived: the agency invoked an optional provision of Michigan privacy law that redacted the last names of winners, rendering the data useless.
The data arrived shortly after that. But our euphoria was short lived: the agency invoked an optional provision of Michigan privacy law that redacted the last names of winners, rendering the data useless for our analysis.
***
FOR ALL THE DIFFICULTIES we faced acquiring state lottery data, we take minor solace that our challenges pale in comparison to some of our overseas counterparts.
As part of our project, we collaborated with reporters in Africa and Europe who were focused on different aspects of the global lottery industry. In Mali, one of our colleagues couldn’t get basic information about lottery player demographics. In South Africa, reporters have waited more than two years to receive a response to request for retailer sales data.
Ultimately, our reporting not only deepened our understanding of the lottery industry, it reinforced our appreciation of strong public records laws-and the importance of using them to push for necessary information.
The Fund for Investigative Journalism supported this reporting project. Check out the other stories on Gaming the Lottery.
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I read all that stuff about which states were helpful and which weren’t expecting there to be a payoff in the end that said what the data showed. Nope. What the heck indeed.
Whitey Bulger once won a large lottery ticket by extorting it from it’s owner. Most of these are probably due to some scam or another.
My Dad taught me,
“When there’s big money involved, somebody’s going to find a way to cheat.”
Yup. Buldger's message was simple; he was either a "partner" on the ticket you bought, or you ended up dead in the trunk of a car. Pretty simple choice.
Yes, and no. I'm pretty sure he made the winning ticket holder an offer that couldn't be refused, compensating the guy off the books so that Bulger could then have a laundered source of income for the tax people.
So what the heck is going on?
Do the ‘winners’ even exist?
Is this a scam where lottery officials are in cahoots with someone who purchases a winning ticket?
“When there’s big money involved, somebody’s going to find a way to cheat.”
Yep. “What one man can make, another man can break.”
When I lived in Georgia I saw this all the time. If an illegal alien hits a decent jackpot he gets someone legal to cash it for him. I'm sure it's common in every state.
I used to play scratch offs a lot and for the most part I didn’t do too bad overall. My loss rate was about 22%. I don’t do that hardly at all any more but I found there was one store where I experienced much higher loss rates. For a while I chalked it up to a fluke, but then it became aggravating. I stopped going there, but it was bothering me so I just had to know. I went in a few times and bought larger numbers of the same game, and I made sure to ask that he had plenty of those left first. That is when I found that sometimes the series (the cards are numbered) would be broken up.
I don’t know how they do it, but I suspect that certain people have identified a way to locate the jackpot cards, either precisely or within an area. The store owners/venders are in a better position to identify the patterns. I never caught on to what it was though
> I’m pretty sure he made the winning ticket holder an offer that couldn’t be refused,
Lots of people call that extortion. ;-)
Old people, or computer illiterate folk go to their ‘trusted’ vendor and ask to have their tickets checked. The vender checks it and tells them they ‘won’ 10 bucks and gives them the cash. Since the vender is not allowed to play, he or she has a partner who regularly is handed the winning ticket and shares the booty.
Years ago Esso (now Exxon) had a “heads or tails” scratch-off promo game. Some young fellow figured out a key to winninmg. IIRC, Esso ended up giving him a cash award and a college scholarship to show them the flaw.
Please quit your abuse of the news forum with chat material.
60 Minutes: How a retired couple found lottery odds in their favor
Best way there is to throw your hard-earned money down a rat hole.
Comedian Jeff Foxworthy once joked that the lottery was the redneck's retirement plan.
I don't know about most winners, but I did work with a man whose mother won $26 million in the California lottery in 1998.
He said that she wanted to buy him stuff, but he would only let her pay off his mortgage and buy him a new pickup. He had worked for my employer for over ten years and had a high-level security clearance, so I tended to believe him.
Please quit your abuse of the news forum with chat material.
What is the distinction? Is there some guidance posted somewhere?
All this stupid crap is very entertaining... Yawn...
Wake me when we get to discussing the groups of people who play and, suspiciously, NEVER win the lottery... I could provide a lot of info on that...
All the rules you want - and more.
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