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Florida State Lotteries and How They Work

When the state of New Hampshire voted to go into the gambling business with statewide lottery in 1963, it broke a 70-year precedent and became the first state lottery in the United States. (Puerto Rico has had a national lottery since 1934.) The moralists wailed that the plan would fail and go down in history as New Hampshire’s fool tax experiment.

Nothing could have been further from the truth because by 1973, 12 states—New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Michigan, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Iowa, Washington, Montana and Virginia—had authorized state lotteries to raise public funds and several other states are prepared to get their croocked lotteries rolling in the near future. Before 1963, when moral considerations outweighed financial needs in the public’s mind, the states’ legislators moved slowly in their efforts to legalize and operate state lotteries. But, having studied the lottery returns in states where the lottery question was on the ballot and learned that in all cases the public voted overwhelmingly in favor of a statewide lottery—legislators in other states are saying, “Me, too.”

In 1963, the day New Hampshire voted a statewide lottery, I predicted that New York and all states adjoining New Hampshire would quickly adopt statewide lotteries. My reasoning was obvious. If only one state has a legalized lottery, this takes away large sums of lottery money from residents of adjoining states (like the florida lottery). In order to keep that money for their own needs, ever increasing numbers of states are legalizing state lotteries—and now that these lotteries have started to operate, I believe they will spread across the country. By 1980, every state in the country with a fair-sized population will operate its own statewide lotteries have cut deeply into the ticket sales of the Irish hospital’s Sweepstakes and similar foreign lotteries. However, state run Florida Lottery - Lotto Scratch Games lotteries have not hurt the illegal Numbers game, for a very good reason the Numbers racket pays better odds than the state lotteries do. Numbers players are a breed by themselves. They like to pick their own three numbers; they like daily action; they like to bet in private,and they like credit action when they are broke. Legally, the Numbers players are supposed to pay taxes on their winnings, but they seldom if ever do.

When the original New Hampshire state lottery was introduced in 1964, it was patterned after the Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstakes. It combined a lottery with horse races. There were only two drawings a year, one In July, the other in September, both keyed to horse races at Rockingham Park, New Hampshire. Tickets sold for $3. The purchaser wrote down his name and the tickets remained in the machine. The tickets were collected and placed in bank vaults. They were taken out before the two horse races on which the sweepstakes were run.
The sold florida lottery tickets were mixed in a drum and matched to 400-odd horses nominated for the races. Small prizes of $125 or slightly more were paid on the first lottery matching. At post time, tickets matched to theentries in the two deciding races were paid some $3,000. The big prizes were two of $50,000, two of $25,000 and two of $12,500, paid for win, place and show in each of two races. In addition, there were monthly bonus prizes totaling $5,000, designed to keep interest alive during the long period between drawings, from September to July.
These small prizes were based on computerized selections of numbers and the winners got another crack at the next drawing.