People buy lottery tickets despite having very little chance of winning, and even though they know that the odds of hitting the jackpot are much lower than a million-to-one. But they also know that a dollar or two can buy a dream, and they’re willing to take the gamble. They’ll sketch out the floor plan of their dream mansion, script “take this job and shove it” moments with their suffocating bosses and coworkers, and think about what they’d do for themselves if only they were rich.
There are a few things that all lotteries must have in order to work: a procedure for selecting winners; a pool of tickets and their counterfoils from which the winners will be chosen; and, most importantly, a process for randomizing the selection. The last requirement is usually handled by computers, which will mix the tickets thoroughly before they’re scanned and compared against a list of winning numbers.
These days, 44 states run lotteries. The six that don’t are Alabama, Alaska, Utah, Mississippi, Nevada, and Hawaii. These states’ reasons vary; Utah and Hawaii lack the financial urgency that would drive other states to adopt the lottery; and Mississippi and Nevada, which allow gambling, don’t want a competing entity eating into their revenue.