Lottery is a game in which participants purchase tickets, usually for one dollar, and win prizes if their numbers match those randomly chosen by machines. State legislatures create lotteries and delegate to lottery divisions the tasks of selecting retailers, training their employees to use ticketing terminals, purchasing equipment to produce tickets, paying high-tier prizes to winners, promoting the game, and ensuring that retailers and players comply with all lottery laws and rules.

Lotteries have been popular in the United States for two centuries. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they helped build the nation’s banking and taxation systems and financed many public projects—including roads, prisons, jails, and hospitals—as well as schools and colleges. They also provided funds to pay for a variety of military, industrial, and civil service jobs.

In the early decades of this century, however, the popularity of lotteries declined dramatically. This drop was caused mainly by state budget crises and the perception that they are morally wrong. The most common moral arguments against lotteries posit that they are not truly voluntary taxes because they lure people into gambling on the illusory hope of winning big, a practice that disproportionately hurts poor and working class people. Other criticisms focus on the blatant advertising of lotteries, which is designed to make them look as unbiased as possible to the unsuspecting public. The evidence is clear: Lotteries do not award a random mix of wins and losses, but rather skew to a predictable pattern.