Tennessee Lottery: Lottery may be top talk among Tennessee legislators this session
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Recent questions about the Tennessee state lottery could become political football in the upcoming legislative session.
Monday, state lottery officials tried to assure lawmakers that a summer glitch will not happen again.
Some, like House Leader and state representative Jason Mumpower, aren't buying the answers.
"Of the $3.7 billion in total sales, approximately $2 billion of that has been awarded to players but most importantly we have raised $1 billion for the education program that we fund," Tennessee Lottery CEO Rebecca Hargrove said Monday.
Numbers of a different sort drew attention over the summer after the lottery switched from a live drawing with numbered balls to a computer generated drawing.
"We discovered a program error by a third party vendor certified by another vendor," said Hargrove. "When we discovered the error we corrected it immediately."
She said policies were put in place to make sure the glitch doesn't happen again.
Mumpower isn't so sure.
He said, "At the end of the day, what matters most does the lottery playing public have confidence in the system and I think that is what the legislature is going to have to decided in this next session."
Rep. Mumpower is holding judgment until a state comptroller report comes out next session about the cost effectiveness of computer generated drawings, versus the ones with numbered balls.
He said, "If we think the lottery playing public would have more confidence in the system by a return to the randomly numbered drawn balls, then I would think we would move in that direction."
Lottery officials claim returning to the live drawings would cost them $5 million yearly.