Illinois lottery scratchers ended before grand prizes were awarded

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Illinois lottery ended the scratchers before the grand prizes were awarded.

This sounds really, really crooked.

If poor old DonDiego were, . . .

Oh, wait a minute ! It's Illinois.

Never mind.

I saw that article and thought "WHAT A CROCK ,then exactly as DD said, 'oh yea, it's IL.' .

I am ashamed to say I live in Illinois!

Should still be piffed. Thought lottery was not rigged.

I always realized there was the possibility that lottery officials were doing end-of-game analysis and stopping games with big unclaimed prizes to maximize their profits....I also wonder if they can control the distribution of big prizes....Like make 10% of the big prizes happen in the first 1% of tickets distributed...to get people interested and then 75% happen in the last 10% of tickets to allow them to cut off the game before those tickets hit the stores. That would be cheating, wouldn't it?

Because the Lottery publishes the odds of possible winning combinations, DonDiego concludes it would be cheating.

Does changing the distribution of wining tickets really change the 'overall' odds of winning at the start of the game? It's the exact same number of possible winning combinations in total.

Hard to believe that this could happen in the People's Republic of Illinois.....hard to believe perhaps for folks who have never lived here. For residents, it's pretty much business as usual.

If the operators consistently end such games prematurely before a proportionate number of "grand prize tickets" are sold, yes.
And the results suggest the opportunity to do so occurred repeatedly; i.e. that "grand prize tickets" were rewarded disproportionately less often.
Poor old DonDiego suggests if the distribution of winning tickets later in the contest is significantly higher than the distribution of winning tickets in similar contests in other States, skullduggery is likely.

From the original post citation:
"For comparable big-prize games begun and ended in Illinois in the six years before Northstar was hired, the state awarded 87.5 percent of the grand prizes the games were designed to pay out.
That's in line with how other states have run their big-prize games.
The Tribune sought data from states with the highest sales of instant tickets. Six states provided enough data from recent years for comparison.
For grand prizes that cost lotteries $1 million or more to fund, New York awarded nearly 80 percent of them.
In Pennsylvania, it was 83 percent.
In Texas, it was 88 percent.
Florida, Massachusetts and Ohio each had a perfect record: 100 percent.
In Illinois, under Northstar, the rate was 59.6 percent."

Or maybe the Government of Illinois was just lucky. Over the years lots of Government employees in Illinois have gotten wealthy too. Perhaps the State Motto should be revised to "Luck is in the Air !"

Oh wait a minute ! It is not necessary to change the State Motto. Apparently one of the State's nicknames is "The Sucker State".
Ref: quotescoop.com