Category: Arkansas Lottery

Arkansas Lottery Continues Pulling the Plug on Scratch-Off Tickets With Millions in Prizes Outstanding

We have written before about how the Arkansas Lottery discontinues lineups of scratch-off tickets while millions of dollars in prizes are still outstanding.

The Arkansas Lottery relies heavily on scratch-off tickets and rolls out new sets of instant tickets every month.

However, the Arkansas Lottery also routinely discontinues scratch-off tickets — some of which may still have a million dollars or more in outstanding prize money.

Just last week the Arkansas Lottery quit letting people redeem winning tickets for its $20 Ultimate Millions scratch-off — even though the Lottery’s website indicates there is still a million dollar jackpot ticket out there somewhere along with about $500,000 in other winning tickets.

These winning tickets either were never sold or — if they were sold — have not been redeemed yet.

By discontinuing the game before all the winning scratch-off tickets were sold or redeemed, the Arkansas Lottery avoids paying out more than $1.5 million in prizes.

Last week was the deadline to redeem winning tickets for at least three other scratch-off games at the Arkansas Lottery besides Ultimate Millions: Hot $200’s, $20K Blast, and 200X Payout. Altogether, nearly $1.5 million in prize money remains outstanding from these three games.

In other states, lotteries have drawn flak for discontinuing scratch-off games before selling all or most of the winning tickets.

Some have questioned whether those lotteries simply did not want to pay money for big prizes.

The Arkansas Lottery already spends more money on prizes than most state lotteries. That high prize budget presumably helps entice people to play the lottery.

But many people may be surprised to learn that a state-run lottery can avoid paying prizes to players simply by cancelling lottery games before all the winning tickets are sold.

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Arkansas Lottery Still Budgeting Millions for Prizes, Little for Scholarships

The Arkansas Lottery continues to budget more than four times as much money for prizes as it does for college scholarships, according to the Lottery’s financial reports for November.

Since July 1 the Arkansas Lottery has spent $164.6 million on prizes, but only $40.8 million on students.

All told, only 17.5% of the Arkansas Lottery’s revenue has gone to college scholarships, but 70.8% has been spent on prizes for lottery players.

For perspective, the typical state-run lottery budgets approximately 60% of its revenue for prizes and 30% for education.

The Arkansas Lottery could pay millions of dollars more to scholarships if it simply would reduce its prize budget and raise its scholarship budget.

Below is a breakdown of Lottery revenue and prize spending since Fiscal Year 2021 began on July 1.

Scholarship Spending

Month	Gross Lottery Revenue	Paid to Scholarships	% Gross Revenue
July	$49,780,369.99	$8,592,573.93	17.3%
August	49,672,105.04	7,862,917.44	15.8%
September	47,501,224.72	7,691,576.99	16.2%
October	42,615,839.96	8,447,337.00	19.8%
November	43,115,514.84	8,207,598.88	19.0%
Total	$232,685,054.55	$40,802,004.24	17.5%

Prize Spending

Month	Gross Lottery Revenue	Total Prizes	% Going to Prizes
July	49,780,369.99	35,641,717.48	71.6%
August	49,672,105.04	35,023,856.83	70.5%
September	47,501,224.72	33,422,556.14	70.4%
October	42,615,839.96	29,995,072.50	70.4%
November	43,115,514.84	30,548,473.72	70.9%
Total	232,685,054.55	164,631,676.67	70.8%

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Arkansas Lottery Rolls Out More Scratch-Off Games

Last week the Arkansas Lottery rolled out four new lines of scratch-off tickets selling for anywhere from $1 to $10 each.

We have written time and again about how scratch-off tickets prey on the poor and desperate.

A 2015 study in Canada found a link between problem gambling and instant lottery tickets, writing,

It is possible that problem gamblers are more attracted to instant win tickets than lottery tickets because instant win tickets provide immediate feedback. Some authors have even described instant win tickets as “paper slot machines” (Griffiths, 2002). Therefore, instant win tickets might be considered a more exciting form of lottery gambling, which may help explain why it attracts a different type of gambler than [ordinary] lottery tickets do. 

A 2018 study published in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions also found a link between how often a person played scratch-off tickets and the severity of a person’s gambling problem.

Despite all of this, the Arkansas Lottery continues to roll out new scratch-off tickets every month and budgets nearly 71% of its revenue for prizes in an ongoing effort to prop up lottery ticket sales.

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