He won $10,000, rather than "10 thousand dollars".

alot of sloppy lottery drawings lately!!!

The fact is the state didn't follow the stated rules of the game and he didn't win. No one can say if nerfarious behavior or favoritism was involved, but it certainly seems suspicious and he doesn't deserve to have his shot at $1 million blown in such a way - I guarantee anyone here would be raging mad at losing in such a way. All he should have to prove is the state didn't follow the game's rules, not that the way it was done was still "random".  What if the state allowed him to pick again in a totally random way and gave him the prize that he picked?

the problem with this is that the other contestants already got paid...

The lottery not following it's own guidelines is bad business, perhaps the kind of thing that triggers an administrative audit.

the only way to fairly resolve this (which is the lottery commission's fault, BTW) is to bring back the 2nd and 3rd place winner.... and let them pick one of 3 envelopes again... in 2 separate picks (one each, can't get more random than that...

3rd place winner already won 10k, so he would have one envelope with $1 million, 1 with $25,000 and one with nothing (because he already won 3rd place)

2nd place winner has 3 envelopes, 1 with $1,000,000 and 2 with nothing (because they already took 2nd)

1st place winner gets to keep and enjoy the $1,000,000

Let Fate decide how much the lottery commission gets penalized for not following their own rules, and the element of chance still exists, so it's not a guaranteed victory for the affected players.

If the other 2 win $1,000,000... I'll bet the lottery is MUCH more careful... since they win every game in the end, it's not an undue burden and it would reflect positively on them for rectifying their foul-up.

That would be the FAIR thing to do...