Makeup Lottery Drawing Held, Results Pending

The Connecticut Lottery Corp. held a do-over drawing Tuesday morning to partially correct a $1.375 million blunder that happened Jan. 1, when nearly half of the eligible tickets in the New Year's Million-Dollar Super Draw game — 100,000 out of the 214,601 sold at $10 each — were excluded from the drawing.

The electronic drawing was conducted without apparent problems by a team of five people using a random number generator machine at lottery headquarters at 777 Brook St. in Rocky Hill.

“No anomalies were noted,” a member of the drawing team said repeatedly at each step of the drawing procedure over a period of just under an hour.

Winning ticket numbers are to be announced by mid-afternoon after final certification of the results that were to be submitted to Scientific Games, the lottery’s vendor, at a separate lottery office two miles away in Rocky Hill.

The numbers will be posted on the lottery’s website for a $1 million top prize, along with 10 winners of $20,000, 50 winners of $1,000, and 1,250 winning tickets worth $100 each.

That is, they’ll be posted publicly assuming that the website recovers from whatever was afflicting it shortly before 1 p.m. — perhaps heavy web traffic from players hoping to see the winning numbers.

Attempts to view the website “timed out” — and a message appeared saying: “The web server failed to respond within the specified time.”

Tuesday’s drawing will result in a second prize payout of $1.375 million in the Super Draw game, because the lottery agency says it will pay the winners in the first, flawed drawing — for which winning ticket numbers were posted publicly on the website before officials realized their mistake. That means the lottery will lose money on the game for which ticket sales totaled $2.14 million. Unclaimed prize money is to be used to make up the difference.

The do-over drawing was held as two state investigations are already underway into how the error occurred on New Year’s Day, and the lack of any problems Tuesday is still unlikely to satisfy many of the holders of the 100,000 tickets who were shut out of a chance in the Jan. 1 drawing.

Many players are unhappy that the makeup drawing included all 214,601 tickets, not just the 100,000 excluded Jan. 1, because that meant that the 114,601 entered in the Jan. 1 drawing got a second chance to win — while the other 100,000 got only this one shot.

The lottery’s interim CEO/president, Chelsea Turner, said there’s no way to fix the problem perfectly, and that lottery regulations require that all tickets sold be included in a drawing. To not include all 214,601 in the second drawing would violate those regulations all over again and compound the initial error, she said.

However, dozens of players have contacted The Courant to protest the quasi-public lottery agency’s handling of the new drawing. A few have talked of trying to initiate a class-action lawsuit.

Others have offered what they believe would be fairer solutions. For example, one said that the second drawing, or even a third one after Tuesday’s, should include the 100,000 tickets excluded Jan. 1 plus another 14,601 consecutive ticket numbers above them (which went unsold). That would make the odds identical to the Jan. 1 drawing, and if any of the unsold tickets come ujp as winners, the prizes could go to charity, the player said.

Tuesday’s drawing, just like the one on New Year’s Day, was run by a team of five people — two of them employees of the lottery, two from the state Department of Consumer Protection (DCP), which regulates the lottery agency, and one from the lottery’s independent auditing firm, Marcum LLP.

The five people on Tuesday’s team were different from those who ran the Jan. 1 drawing. Both the lottery agency and DCP are conducting separate investigations into how the Jan. 1 blunder happened and who is responsible. Two lottery employees have been placed on paid administrative leaves, while the two DCP employees from Jan. 1 have been taking off drawing assignments while the department investigates its part in the snafu.

Lottery officials will not say if they’ll pursue Marcum, a major national accounting firm with four Connecticut offices, for any financial responsibility in the Jan. 1 blunder.

Here’s what’s known so far about that mistake, according to DCP’s communications director, Lora Rae Anderson:

Incorrect numbers were entered into the random number generator machine by a lottery employee on the team, despite a step-by-step, illustrated instruction manual emphasizing that ticket numbers went upward from a low of 100001 — so the second ticket would be 100002, the third 100003, and so on. With, 214,601 tickets sold, the range of eligible tickets should have been 100001 at the low end, and 314,601 at the top. But the lottery employee instead entered 214601 as the top number, omitting the 100,000 tickets numbered from 214602 through 314601.

The mistake in the number entries was missed by a DCP employee and Marcum’s representative, who were supposed to observe whether things were done properly, Anderson has said.

Meanwhile, DCP’s investigation has already run into conflicting stories about what happened Jan. 1. “The Department has begun conducting interviews with parties involved in the Super Draw drawing that occurred on Monday, January 1st, 2018. At this time, there are conflicting accounts of that day’s events,” Anderson said in an email last week.

Meanwhile, state Rep. Joe Verrengia, D-West Hartford, says that he may seek another round of investigative hearings into lottery operations, similar to two hearings he convened last May in his role as co-chairman of the General Assembly’s public safety committee.

Another effect of the current problem is another delay, for now and perhaps for weeks, in the hiring of a permanent CEO to replace Anne Noble, who stepped down in September 2016 during the DCP’s investigation of the 5 Card Cash fraud scheme. Noble stayed on until mid-2017 under a lucrative severance/consulting package, and Turner, her longtime subordinate, has been acting CEO since then. Turner is believed to be one of four current finalists being considered by the lottery’s board of directors. The other three are from out of state.

Subscribe and listen to the Capitol Watch Podcast

iTunes | Soundcloud | Google Play | TuneIn

Let's block ads! (Why?)