The lottery is a huge business, with Americans spending more than $100 billion each year on tickets. Super-sized jackpots drive sales and earn the games a torrent of free publicity on news sites and newscasts. But this publicity has a dark side, as the prize money becomes more attractive to criminals looking for a quick score. This is one of the reasons why some state officials are pushing to allow winners to remain anonymous.

In a country that has long been defined politically by an aversion to taxation, lotteries have often been a budgetary miracle, allowing politicians to swell coffers without raising taxes. In the early nineteen-eighties, when America was going through a tax revolt (one that culminated in California’s Proposition 13, which cut property taxes by sixty per cent), many states turned to the lottery for cash.

The most common way to win a lottery is by buying a ticket that contains numbers or symbols, with the bettor responsible for determining whether he or she won. In modern times, a bettor may choose his or her own numbers by filling in an official form or using a computer to select them. Regardless of how the ticket is purchased, all lotteries have the same basic elements.

In the early twenty-first century, the lottery gained popularity as a “classic” lottery with preprinted numbers and symbols, but this type of lottery gradually lost ground to lotteries where bettors can choose their own numbers. The latter are more likely to produce a winner, and the prizes are more valuable.