Yeah the odds might be 125k to 1 to win a raffle but on a dollar by dollar basis a $20 ticket is like hitting a 2.5 million to one lotto for a buck.

It is just another way to screw with the numbers to make it APPEAR that your odds are so great.

The only benefit of a raffle game to the common player is lack of churn.  Only high tier prizes are rewarded. So this lotto makes more sense to play when looking for the life changing score. The reason most lotteries pay out 2 of 5 or 3 of 6 is they know you will just reinvest that into more tickets the next time you buy therefore there is more churn.  I would rather just play games that have high tier prizes but then lower the odds to win. But the lottery will never do that. The raffle is as close as you get to that, but again it still pays back the state mandated 50%.

No, that's not an appropriate odds calculation because every ticket sold is $20. 

If you were playing regular lotto, where tickets sell for $1, and you bought $20 worth of tickets, then you could apply some kind of per-dollar odds calculation, but you can't do that when the base price is $20.

It i more appropriate to compare it to a $20 scratch-off that only has a printing of 250,000 tickets, rather than the millions they normally print.

People play the raffle games BECAUSE there are only high prizes.  Before raffles came around there were no games perfectly suited to high-stakes players who don't want to play a game with lower-tier prizes.  Now there is, thank goodness.