Official Lottery is an easy, informative lottery app that helps you keep track of your winning numbers and prizes. It also scans your tickets, and lets you know when it’s time to pick up your prize!

The app is free and works well, but the barcode scanner doesn’t work as expected. It takes a few seconds for the app to scan each ticket, and most of the time it just skips or doesn’t read at all. I’ve tried scanning multiple times and even reinstalled the app to no avail. I hope that the developers will address this issue, because it’s a great app otherwise!

In the early years of the modern lottery, proponents claimed that state gambling would help fill state coffers and keep money in the pockets of average citizens. It was a tempting premise. America was notoriously tax averse, and states were facing budgetary crises that could not be resolved by raising taxes or cutting services.

Lottery opponents questioned both the ethics of funding public services through gambling and how much revenue the states really stood to gain. They hailed from all sides of the political spectrum and a wide variety of social and economic groups, but were dominated by devout Protestants, who viewed government-sanctioned lotteries as morally unconscionable.

The modern lottery began to take off in the nineteen-sixties, when the growing awareness of how much money there was to be made in gambling collided with a crisis in state finances. Amid soaring inflation and the rising cost of the Vietnam War, America’s prosperity began to fade, and state governments struggled to balance their budgets without raising taxes or cutting services.