My mother has been playing the lottery for years. She’s won prizes as big as $1,000, and prizes as small as $2.00 (after spending about $12.00 on lottery tickets). My mother plays consistently, and likewise, she complains consistently when she doesn’t win.
As of this writing, she is especially perturbed with the Powerball and the Mega Millions lotteries due to the fact that she has not, to this point, won either.
It’s estimated that the chances of winning the Powerball jackpot are roughly 1 in 292,201,338 odds against. To me, these long odds reasonably explain why so many people never win the Powerball jackpot.
My mother’s not buying it. She’s determined the real reason why nobody, especially her, ever wins:
“It’s fixed.”
I’m sure that many of you unfortunate lottery players secretly share my mother’s belief. So the following passage will try to dispel that belief.
I’ll do so by explaining how the lottery machines work, and more importantly, what lottery agencies do to ensure fair drawings.
First, we’ll discuss the lottery machines themselves.
Now if you’ve ever watched a Powerball, Mega Millions, or any lottery drawing live on television, you should be convinced that everything you see happening is occurring on the up and up.
Camera placement, tube, and container transparency, and the display trays are all designed (and filmed) in such a way that nothing happens outside of the watchful eyes of the soon-to-be-multi-millionaires.
Lottery balls are loaded in full view, mixed in full view, and shuffled along through tubes from their mixing chamber to their final destination, all in full view of the onlookers.
These lottery machines price out at about $55,000 each, but the science behind how they function isn’t very complicated. Depending on which drawing you watch, you’ll see one of two types of machines.
The lottery machine used to draw the smaller games like Pick 3, Pick 4, etc., is called an Air-Mix Lotto Machine.
With drawings that use this machine, a basket or other type of sealed, see-through chamber is filled with ping pong balls. Each ping pong ball is numbered.
A fan at the bottom blows up into the chamber, causing the ping pong balls to float, whirl around and generally mix in amongst themselves inside the chamber.
As mentioned previously, the winning balls shoot up and out one at a time through a transparent tube, into a transparent tray.
Hey, look at that! You won some cash!!
For the larger jackpot drawings Like Mega Millions and Powerball, a different machine is employed.
A machine called a Gravity Pick Lottery Machine is used for these drawings, and it is widely accepted as the fairest and the most secure.
Unlike the Air-mix machine which uses a stream of air to mix ping pong balls, the Gravity Pick Lottery Machine uses paddles to stir the balls.
These balls are usually made of rubber. Numbered balls are dropped into the spinning chamber from a set of transparent tubes above the machine.
Once inside the drum, each paddle rotates in an opposite direction mixing the balls. Each ball drops out of the bottom of the drum, one at a time.
And as with the Air-mix machine, each winning ball rolls through a transparent tube and into a visible tray. An optical sensor tracks the movement of each ball to ensure that only the correct number of balls passes through (imagine if 1 ball too many passed through after you think you won $500 million?).
As is the case with both types of drawings, viewers can see the balls at all times. If you’re one of a lucky few, you’ve just won millions and millions of dollars in a lottery drawing my mother will tell you is fixed.
Speaking of that, let’s get into the measures that lottery agents take to ensure the fairest outcomes.
First of all, the balls themselves are all measured and tested to ensure that they are all the same size, shape, and weight (a ball whose number is fading and gets a new paint job can change the ball’s weight, for example).
Usually, many sets of balls and many machines are stored in a secure location that is only accessible to authorized lottery officials.
From those many sets of machines and balls, the ones to participate in the actual drawing are selected at random by an independent third party, usually not too long before the drawing is scheduled to start.
An independent auditor is brought in to oversee the entire process from beginning to end, and he or she has the authority to waive machines or balls due to mechanical difficulties or otherwise, as well as waive the drawing if suspicion of foul play warrants it.
The drawing machines themselves are isolated from any kind of connection to any outside network (air-gapped is what it’s called), to prevent any kind of hacking or other outside influence.
Large drawings like Mega Millions use two sets of machines – one to draw the winning numbers and a second to draw the mega ball.
The entire process is videotaped from start to finish, more tests are done after the drawing as part of the verification procedure, and independent firms are present to witness it all.
If you explain all of this to my mother, here’s what she’ll say,
“Nope, it’s fixed.”
What are you gonna do?