At this point in the conversation, the person inevitably swings back to trying to cheat the system. With multi-millions of dollars on the line, I understand the impulse to want to get it. Often a comparison is made to locks, how there is always a way to open a lock no matter how complicated. Which is true, if you know about the inside of a lock, it makes opening the lock that much easier but that analogy doesn’t exactly hold true here because locks are meant to be opened. The lottery is explicitly designed to be tamper proof, and, for the most part, each state does a superb job of this. Whole divisions are employed to secure the lottery from people who wish to change the results and they look at the public and those on the inside. It’s not so much the money they want to avoid paying (they would have to pay it out anyway), but rather the bad publicity. If it got out that the game was rigged, ticket sales would drop by a dramatic percentage.
You can think of state lotteries like Las Vegas in many ways, at the very least in terms of how everything is separated and monitored for security’s sake. In a casino, the floor guys don’t count the money, and the counters don’t necessarily take the money to the vault. Each stage is guarded and controlled. The same thing happens with the lotteries.
In order to rig a drawing to pull up certain, pre-determined, numbers you would have to collude with at least six other people across multiple areas of the lottery system, areas that are heavily watched, scrutinized, and don’t normally communicate. All it takes is one slip and the whole scheme is toast. And trying to change the numbers after the drawing is even more difficult. To get past the multiple audits and system checks, not to mention the constant monitoring, would be a miracle.
Also, it’s been tried on several occasions and failed every time. This is not something new. It is a very quick way to go to prison, though, and not the nice prison either. If the state thinks you are trying to scam them, they call in favors and get you sent to someplace extremely nasty. There is one example that comes to mind of a state lottery employee who got caught rigging orders on instant win tickets with a friend who worked at a local convenience store. As always, the audits kicked in and they were caught. Guess where they are spending their next few years?
I always bum people out when we talk about this because deep inside Americans always believe that there is a way around the system. In this case, there might be but no one has found it yet. If you try, the most likely outcome is that you will get caught, charged, and sent to prison. Unless of course you can travel through time...
Probably the most interesting response to this came from a random conversation I had online where someone asked about having knowledge from the future. They brought up the hypothetical scenario where somehow a person learned to transmit information from the future to the past, in other words, a form of time travel. Now, I don’t necessarily take this kind of thing seriously but I admit that it’s, at least, possible (although not even close to being probable). If someone was able to go back in time, change the past and win the lottery, I think that would be completely legal. So far there is no legislation that I know of in any state dealing with time travel or the use of knowledge gained from that.
It might sound nutty, but I have heard of this kind of mental projection taking place before. A book I read recently called Quantum Lottery deals with this on a differently level but some of the scientific studies the author of that book quotes make it seem like traveling in time, at least with your mind may be possible. If this is too much for you, or if you think this is the dumbest thing you have ever heard in your life, please don’t mind me. I just think that there is so much we don’t know about the universe and who really knows if such a thing is impossible or not? Not me.
Regardless, if someone has actually done this or knows more about it, they are not sharing.