A lottery is a game of chance where numbers are drawn at random to determine the winner. The prizes may be cash or goods, services or travel tickets. Many countries have national or state lotteries. Others have regional or local lotteries. In the United States, the federal government regulates some lotteries. Other lotteries are operated by private businesses or charities. In Canada, lottery games are legal only if the provincial governments permit them.
Lao officials rig the country’s state-run lottery to avoid large pay-outs, sources in the communist nation say. Drawings in the country’s lottery are often manipulated, with winning numbers appearing to vanish from purchased tickets, or deemed unlucky and unlikely to be picked, a source in Vientiane told RFA. A spokesman for the nation’s Lottery Commission declined to comment.
In New Zealand, the national lottery is controlled by the Government through an autonomous Crown entity, Lotto New Zealand, which oversees the operation of the nationwide Lotto and Instant Kiwi scratch card games. Profits from the lotteries are distributed by Lotto New Zealand through the Lottery Grants Board to support charitable projects and organizations domestically and internationally.
Lottery is a popular activity in China, and players have the option of buying tickets through the Internet or via mobile phone text messages. There are also a number of illegal online lotteries, which offer illegitimate prizes and are not licensed by the state. In 2006, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences conducted a study on online lottery sites and found that many were not operating legally.
The winner of this month’s $1.3 billion Powerball jackpot will receive a lump sum payment of $422 million after taxes. Forty-six-year-old Cheng Saephan, of Portland, Oregon, announced the prize at a news conference on Monday, wearing a sash emblazoned with “Iu Mien USA.” The Iu Mien are a southeast Asian ethnic group with roots in southern China, many of whom fled from Laos to Thailand during the Vietnam War and then settled in the West Coast of the U.S. Saephan said he and his wife, Duanpen, will take half the prize money. He plans to give the rest to a friend, Laiza Chao, who chipped in $100 to buy the winning tickets with them.
Until 1967 it was illegal in Canada to buy lottery tickets. In that year, the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau introduced an omnibus bill that allowed provinces to allow regulated lottery systems. Today, the Canadian lottery includes four nationwide games: Lotto 6/49, Lotto Max (which replaced Lotto Super 7 in September 2009), Daily Grand and Millionaire Life. The Quebec Lottery Corporation, which operates the Quebecois lotteries, is a separate organization that sells tickets in the provinces and territories. A total of $1.2 billion in revenues were generated by the lotteries in 2007. The lottery industry provides employment to nearly 20,000 people and has a net contribution to the economy of $1 billion a year.