Maybe. Not sure this goes far enough.
After assisting investors who stacked the odds to guarantee winning a $95 million Lotto Texas jackpot last year, Texas Lottery Commission officials said they have changed their procedures to prevent another such occurrence in the future – but not before state lawmakers, citing Houston Chronicle reporting, ripped into agency leaders for helping the group orchestrate a giant payday at the expense of everyday players.
“You collaborated with a group of sophisticated players,” Rep. Matt Shaheen, a Plano
Republican, said during a legislative hearing last week. “A significant percentage of lottery sales in Texas is to lower-income individuals, and I think they were taken advantage of.”
“There’s no question in my mind that the integrity [of the lottery] was lost in this process,” added Sen. Tan Parker, a Flower Mound Republican. “I’m even more concerned with the report that it seemed as if staff was supportive of and working with the organization.”
[…]
In response to the resulting publicity, the Gov. Greg Abbott-appointed lottery commissioners directed the agency’s executive director to study the issue of wholesale, or syndicate buyers, and recommend policy changes. Director Ryan Mindell and lottery commission Chairman Robert Rivera declined interview requests.
But at a lottery commission meeting earlier this month, Mindell said the gaming industry had seen growing activity from so-called purchasing groups, including in Indiana, Maryland, and Oklahoma. “With modern analytical tools and large amounts of funds at their disposal, every lottery game in the country, and likely the world, will be analyzed in one form or another by these types of groups,” he said.
He also told the commissioners that despite media scrutiny of last year’s Lotto draw, “the integrity of the game was not compromised,” noting that every ticket purchased had the same mathematical chance of winning. Mindell, however, did not address the fact that if a single player buys up all ticket combinations, other players are, at best, competing for only half the advertised jackpot.
Still, he added, “it is also clear these activities harm the perception of the Lotto Texas game.” So in the future, Mindell said, if a retailer makes a sudden request for more terminals, the application would be reviewed by the agency’s legal staff and the executive director. Under such rules, he said he would reject a similar request in the future.
“This will prevent rapid deployment of terminals to retailers who do not have a record of sustained sales, who may be acting in response to temporary demand,” Mindell said. He added that he also was tweaking lottery terminal software to inhibit investor sales, though he declined to elaborate, saying it would compromise the game’s security.
[…]
When Galveston Republican Sen. Mayes Middleton tried to pin down the lottery director on the growth of controversial online “courier” companies that have sprung up in Texas, Mindell gave him incorrect information.
While such companies are licensed or prohibited in several states, Texas officials have taken a hands-off approach, asserting they have no authority to regulate the businesses. The entities, with names like Jackpocket, LotteryNow and Lottery.com, take ticket orders and payment over a phone app.
Then, because Texas law requires lottery tickets to be purchased in-person, they dispatch couriers to state-licensed brick-and-mortar outlets to complete the transaction. Most of the companies, however, have collapsed the model by spinning off affiliated entities to acquire retailer licenses from the Texas Lottery Commission, meaning they can both take orders and process the sales in-house.
See here and here for the background. I had previously expressed some confusion about the logistics of buying 26 million Lottery tickets in the span of a few days. That last paragraph above helps me understand it better. Seems to me a lot of the grunt work can be eliminated by combining the retailer and the purchasing agent. It also seems clear that the simplest way to put these companies out of business is to prohibit that form of ownership. Will the Lege go that route? We’ll find out in a few months.