With over 100 million people playing the lottery regularly every year in the US alone (a staggering 50% of the adult population), you can imagine that that’s quite a lot of wasted paper. Hundreds of millions of paper lottery tickets are sold across North America every year, which is easy enough to fill several forests’ worth of trees.
Fortunately, online lotteries have been gradually rolled out across a few select US states since the US Department of Justice ruled in 2011 that this was permissible. This has the potential to be potentially saving millions of trees worth of printed paper every single year. Let’s take a quick look at the state of digital lotteries in America today, and where we may be headed for in the future.
Where Things Currently Stand
As mentioned, the ability to play the lottery online at all have been highly limited and a fairly recent phenomenon in America. Following the 2011 DoJ ruling, plenty of states have got the ball rolling to try and allow their citizens to play the lottery online.
A few so far have succeeded in this process, with a total of six states currently allowing unrestricted access to online lotteries in the United States. These are; New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, and Illinois.
Pennsylvania is the latest entrant to the race, having passed a sweeping gambling law earlier this year allowing for a blanket permit for all forms of online gaming.
The first-ever digital lottery tickets in the state went live in May 2018, and have since been met with a huge amount of fanfare and a surge in popularity. Similar responses have been since in the other states to have passed these new laws, which is what has prompted states such as New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts to follow suit, with all of them placing online lottery bills before their state legislature in the past couple of years. It’s clear to see where things are heading.
The Future of Online Lotteries
The ease of access that digital lotteries allow, especially with most providers offering players the chance to use mobile-friendly iGaming apps, clearly allows people to save time and money while getting more out of the experience. Combine this with the fact that paper lottery tickets should become a thing of the past in the same way that plastic bags are about to be, and we have an environmentally conscious and user-friendly way to improve what is an everyday part of life for 100 million Americans.
Digitization should be welcomed when it improves accessibility and user experience, which is likely why more and more states are embracing the concept, or at least resisting it much less than in the past. Within the next few years, it is highly probable that dozens of more states across the US will embrace online lotteries, following the highly successful examples of those that have already done so.
While the lottery may be a game, it is popular among such a huge portion of the population for many other reasons too, and digitizing the whole thing would allow even more people to participate.