Tenn. lawmakers want to force lottery to drop computer draws

This article is a little scary. It makes me feel bad that the elected officials cant work together to solve this matter. Jason Mumpower is on the right tract. Gov. Phil Bredesen should realize it's the people who play the lottery and they should have had a say so in the mater. The lawmakers agreed to a lottery and now he doesn't want them to be a part of reorganizing the lottery drawings. The people depend on the lawmakers to make decisions for them when they do not have a direct say so in the matter. The people cant force Hargrove to switch back to ball drawings. Only elected officials can.

Hargrove is at the helm of the lottery but should not be in total control. She switched lottery drawings from real ball drawings to computerized drawing without so much as a hint to lottery players prior to doing so. Except for a one line sentence buried inside another article on their web page a statement was made about an exciting new way to draw the numbers and that was it. DONE and implemented. Many lottery players are opposed to computers drawing numbers. I know she is aware of that. And it is probably one of the reasons she didn't bother to let the general public in on her desire to switch from ball drawings the computerized drawings. She knew the outcome would be not to switch drawing types.

Regardless of her intentions she jumped the gun implemented computerized drawings and because of her hastily decision to do so caused the lottery to conduct drawings without extensive testing of the software that produces the numbers and we all know what happen next. That software was defective and a programing error cause a glitch which went unnoticed for weeks. She put the blame on everyone but herself.

Now for the main reason to switch back to real live ball drawings. The software can be manipulated at the push of a button they can control the outcome of a drawing. There is no way of knowing if the software is corrupted on any given day. The players don't want computers drawing the numbers. Find some way of conducting real live ball drawings and get back to the business at hand. Making money for the Tennessee schooling programs.

Find and or seek out ways to conduct live ball drawings in a cost effective manner like other states that have live ball drawings. Hargrove is a member of the lottery association she can confer with them for tips on how to conduct ball drawings.

Many thanks to House Minority Leader Jason Mumpower for looking into this matter and doing his best to help get things back to normalcy.

personally i can't stand Gov. Phil Bredesen.for one he took away a half million peoples health insurance here including people with epilepsy,cancer,etc. including me when i was sick myself at the time.he completely ignores things he doesn't want to bother with or dismisses them without looking into it further.the statement about him makes me think he'll be the roadblock in the whole deal.i wish bredesen would just step back and let other people handle this and go take care of other issues.

I have to say that he is the best govenor that I have seen in TN.  He is FOR the state.  He has to be the one to make the tough choices.  He is correct in his statement ..let the lottery commission do their job.  Instead of getting mired down in the lottery mess, the legislature could give them a list of questions to investigate.  The first question on the list I would give them is how does using balls costs 5 million more per year?  Is that the salaries of the people who draw the balls?  If it is, I WANT that job!  If it is television, they should be able to work that out so the cost is lower.  They only use about 1-1:30 minutes of television time with the computers giving the drawings  but they run MORE commercials. Commercials cost money.

Every lottery has operating expenses and thats where the committee should start trimming the fat and finding ways to conduct live ball lottery drawings that are cost effective. Hargrove claims that they have conducted drawings in the past and had several TV stations in on the deal this isn't necessary as they only need one station to conduct the drawing and the rest of the stations that are willing could just post the numbers in a little box one the right hand portion of the TV screen during the preempted show that airs shortly after the drawing occurs.

Thats just great at a time when Tennesseans need his support and he might possibly take notice of these posts. I would think since you detest computerized drawings so much that you and all Tennesseans might want to convince the governor of that, instead you berate him publicly.

Mike you have to remember ultimately it's the people that have the power but in order to get them to implement change you must stick together and act as one voice.

aye

I would love to have that job too at that pay.

As for commercials costing...

Isn't commercials just advertising that have to pay big bucks during the time people watch TV the most.   I would say that an advertising would cost more around the time they were about to drop the balls.  Would you not think so?

Think about the Super Bowl commercials... They are the highest paid commericals in a year.   

With that being said... the ball droppings for the TV station should be free and those who are advertising around that time slot should be more expensive.

I hope the Tennessee Lottery is able to secure a director and staff which will

(1) listen to player input

(2) listen to player input [not a typo]

(3) assure all aspects of its operations are transparent to reinvent its image, restore player confidence in its honesty.

I seen this posted before but I never really noticed it until now. I see more then just you seen and caught it because of the payouts going up on each draw. I wish I had seen it or caught it but since they changed to the computer I really couldn't care for the TN lottery. I still track doubles on pick three but that's about it.

While you don't normally expect to see repeating digits or numbers in computerized drawings they do occur just like ball drawings. Some people play what could be called a back up bet. They play the last number that came out hoping for such an occurrence. Seemed like it worked out very well for some people since the payout grew for the third draw. I'm not condoning computerized drawings by a long shot. It could also have been a software hiccup. Since theoretically it's not supposed to happen as the seed program should have created a different number for each draw.

I have a friend who made a homemade RNG box from parts bought a radio shack and whenever we played with it we rarely got the same number to come up twice in a row and i cant remember if it ever came up 3 times in a row. The same numbers did come up boxed or straight in a series of draws which we blew off as an anomaly.

Now considering that Tennessee uses this rng software and they do pre draws and tests. In actuality the number that we are discussing didn't come up three times in a row it came up three time during a sequence of draws. Which is a far cry from three draws in a row. Now whether that is normal or not can be disputed. But not verified. This is just another reason in along line of reasons why Tennessee should bring back the mechanical ball drawings. As seeing is believing and computers leave doubts in the players minds.