This is great for the winner, but how would you prevent collusion here? Suppose all winners of every lottery were anonymous -- how would you know the lotteries are even legit?<p>1. You might argue that auditors and other government officials would enforce integrity. However, it would be trivial to bribe them. In addition, without total transparency you couldn't have confidence in what they're saying, anyway. It's <i>too</i> easy for them to lie.<p>2. Perhaps the real winners name would be in some book somewhere, e.g. a tax log, but the real name is out of public sight. This would also be easy to rig. If it's anonymous what's stopping the lottery commission and state government from creating a fake winner?<p>3. Perhaps the biggest argument in favor of a pro-anonymous lottery is that you already can be anonymous by setting up a trust. This is true, but doesn't answer the question -- <i>how do you know it's legit?</i><p>Maybe we should just cap the winnings at 10K, an amount that people wouldn't bug you so much for and change the odds such that the revenue the state gets is the same.<p>Then everyone wins, no? So, in this case, instead of a single winner of 580M you could've had 60 thousand people win 10K instead. Sounds pretty good. An amount high enough that you'd give it a shot for a buck, but not so high that you'd annoy them if they won.
And yet the comments from her lawyer detail reveal how much money she's donated to which charities. So much for anonymity! Between that, her gender, her home town, and even the name of her lawyer, there's WAY too much PII to pretend her identity is a mystery.
What to do if you win: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vo34/whats_the_happiest_5word_sentence_you_could_hear/chb38xf/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vo34/whats_the...</a>
In Austria, and Europe afaik, it is common practice not to disclose the name of the winner, only the location. It is done so for privacy reasons. I was always wondering why in the US this was different and always found it a bit strange. But I do understand now.
"The state had argued that the names of lottery winners must be disclosed to ensure that prizes are distributed fairly and that winners are not related to lottery employees."<p>First, they know who they are writing the check to so the whole "not related to lottery employees" part seems rather bogus.<p>I thought the whole point of disclosure was publicity, but this got plenty and being able to gamble without telling the world you won probably will sell more tickets anyway which is the whole point of the publicity.
There is something about lottery winning (easy money perhaps?) that attracts trouble. There are so many millionaires in tech world of acquisitions and IPOs that made so much more. Most never got into lottery winner kinds of trouble.
How is it that people worth a lot more money manage to walk the earth among us mere mortals without being preyed upon like these lottery winners? 24x7 security detail? light sabers? both?
I'm mostly curious to see what the impact is of this is on future court cases. Presumably in New Hampshire winners won't need to create a trust in order to get the winnings anymore.
From what I understand about this case, she wrote her name on the ticket, and once you do that, the state is in charge of whether or not that name gets revealed because removing the name would invalidate the ticket, legally.<p>So a judge basically said, "Well, we can break the law here and force the state to keep your name private because I say so; I'm a judge."<p>All the arguments about privacy and stuff, were really about whether it would be fair to break the law or now, not necessarily because they had some sort of legal standing.<p>No wonder people don't have faith in the American legal system.