Online Lottery Tickets

"Lottery ticket" redirects here. For the 1970 Indian film, see         Play online lottery  (1970 film). For the 2010 American film, see Lottery Ticket (2010 film). For other uses, see Lottery (disambiguation).

A lottery drawing being conducted at the television studio at Texas LotteryCommission headquarters

A lottery is a form of legalized government gambling that involves the drawing of numbers for a prize. Lotteries are outlawed by some governments, while others endorse it to the extent of organizing a national or state lottery. It is common to find some degree of regulation of lottery by governments; the most common regulation is prohibition of sale to minors. Though lotteries were common in the United States and some other countries during the 19th century, by the beginning of the 20th century, most forms of gambling, including lotteries and sweepstakes, were illegal in the U.S. and most of Europe as well as many other countries. This remained so until well after World War II. In the 1960s casinos and lotteries began to re-appear throughout the world as a means for governments to raise revenue without raising taxes.

Lotteries come in many formats. For example, the prize can be a fixed amount of cash or goods. In this format there is risk to the organizer if insufficient tickets are sold. More commonly the prize fund will be a fixed percentage of the receipts. A popular form of this is the "50–50" draw where the organizers promise that the prize will be 50% of the revenue.^{[citation needed]} Many recent lotteries allow purchasers to select the numbers on the Play lottery online ticket, resulting in the possibility of multiple winners.