Faith needs to be restored in MASS Lottery

Monday, June 11, 2007 posted 11:38 AM EDT

The state Lottery used to be a well-oiled machine, raking in money and dispensing it to cities and towns, and the lucky winners of scratch tickets and its many other games. But a few recent blunders have left us wondering who is running the show these days.

On May 1, the Lottery began selling its most expensive scratch tickets ever, the $20 Star-Spangled Sweepstakes tix. The major flaw with these tickets is that the drawing will not be held until July 4. Lottery masterminds forgot why people buy scratch tickets in the first place — they want to know if they have won and they want to know now. They don't want to wait for a number to be drawn at night, never mind two months later. So it is no surprise that just 20 percent of the tickets have been sold when Lottery operators expected them to sell out within days.

To compound the blunder, the Lottery figured that, to boost sales, it would offer $1,000 daily prizes. The problem is that officials didn't tell many people and ticket buyers didn't even know about the add-on. Players have to match a number on their ticket with a number on the Lottery's Web site to win.

Two problems: Winners have just seven days to claim their prizes, so who knows how many people have won, but failed to cash in. And not everyone has access to a computer. The only sure winner? The state, of course. But that's the way it is in every Lottery game. Lottery players understand and accept that; they just don't like having rules they can't understand or that change in mid-stream.

Speaking of which ...

Since 2004, the Lottery has held a second-chance drawing of sorts, encouraging people to clean up litter by turning in losing tickets. For every 25 losers, they would get a $1 ticket. That had many people scrounging for tickets and cleaning up around sites where tickets are sold. Some people had collected tens of thousands of tickets and were waiting for the next recycling period to claim their new tickets.

But the Lottery quietly dropped the program and left people holding the trash — literally. It was unfair to encourage this cleanup, then end the program with, for the most part, no notice.

The right thing to do would be to hold one more recycling day when people who cleaned up in good faith can be given one more chance to “clean up.”

It is the fair and honest course of action and might spur people to put a little more faith in the Lottery, which in turn could lead to the sale of more Star Spangled tickets that few people seem to want.

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