About Official Lottery
The official lottery website offers players the chance to track jackpots and winning numbers, and sign up for notifications about jackpots, draw games and Scratchers. The site also provides players with a variety of other useful information.
In the fourteen hundred and fifteenth centuries, people began to gamble for money, and the lottery was born. Its basic elements were simple: for a fixed amount of money, bettors wrote down on a piece of paper their names and the number or other symbol on which they placed their stake. Then, the lottery organization shuffled and matched those tickets with other ones in a drawing, and the bettors were informed whether they had won.
State-sponsored lotteries are now a common form of public entertainment, and their proceeds often benefit a broad range of social services. But they have long been controversial, especially when the prizes are large. Some critics, particularly devout Protestants, have argued that the state’s involvement in gambling is immoral. Others have pointed out that lottery revenues tend to increase during economic downturns, and that the winners disproportionately come from poor or working-class neighborhoods.
New York, for example, began its own lottery in 1967 and promised that the proceeds would fund education. Since then, it has raised billions of dollars. Some states allow players to buy their tickets online, and some even have courier services that send players the official lottery products. The map below shows which states offer these options and what types of products they have available.