buying lottery tickets

"she says sorry but the machine is acting up."

Translation: I don't know how to run this simple machine so I'll blame it on a malfunction and hope this customer buys my mistake or I can sell it to other players."

Have you ever seen them run a slip 2 or 3 times before the terminal read it and printed your ticket(s)?  The terminals definitely act up sometimes. A bit of dirt, a water spot, whatever, and the machine may think there's a mark where there isn't. If the "mark" makes it look like you've picked too many numbers you won't get a ticket, but if the "mark" makes it looklike you chose advance play, powerplay, or a QP in the next game panel, you'll get tickets you didn't ask for.

I choose lump sum.

That wasn't a choice pac! Would you like to buy that answer or choose a new one? LOL!!!

Those would be great excuses had the clerk not said "the machine is acting up", but we can play 10 future draws on one play slip so I'm not buying any of their excuses when they tell me the $12 worth of tickets I intended to play will cost me $120.

"if the "mark" makes it looklike you chose advance play, powerplay, or a QP in the next game panel, you'll get tickets you didn't ask for."

Amazing how those 'bits of dirt', 'a water spot', or 'whatever' look exactly like an X marked inside an 1/8 inch square box using pencil, black, or blue ink. And just happened to land exactly in the box for 10 future draws. That's not half as amazing as when you look at the play slip and see nothing inside the box.

They can't cancel Mega Millions tickets in Ohio so if the reader is really acting up, why not just stop selling tickets?

i do both ..buy mistake and still play my picks

Yeah, I buy them. Sometimes I go with just them, sometimes I also play what I set out to play, too.

I always hope such mistakes are an "omen", but it's never worked yet.

the reason i buy them is that normally if you picked some of your numbers right then maybe you get a break and catch the mistake #  that you didnt have originally

"Those would be great excuses had the clerk not said "the machine is acting up"

Would you explain that to me? The machine couldn't be confused by dirt because the clerk says it's acting up? Wouldn't that be exactly what it is doing (at least allowing a broad definition for "acting up")?

As far as how such things would happen, I think it's a pretty safe bet that the terminal doesn't use optical character recognition, and has no idea whether the little boxes are marked with X's, Q's, ampersands, lines, or blobs. OTOH, marking a spot on a white piece of paper changes the reflectivity of the paper. Anything that gets between the laser and the bet slip will change how much is reflected, and the scanner only reacts to how much light comes back; the dirt and dust don't have to be on the slip. If the scanner doesn't have some fault tolerance it won't read slips where even a single box isn't 100% filled with ink of the proper reflectivity, so it has to be able to read slips where the marks have a wide range of reflectivity or too many slips will be unreadable. On the other end of the scale, the machine has to be able to ignore minor marks that don't matter, or every tiny spot that extends outside a box will cause a problem. In the real world I expect that  there are many things that result in multiple reads before a ticket is printed, but people don't pay much attention to that, and they aren't even aware when th emachine simply ignores an apparent mark that it considers unimportant. On the infrequent occasions that an error results in a faulty ticket(s) people do remember. That means you don't know about the dozens of times the scanner reads a trivial "mark" you didn't put on the slip, but you do remember the few where the "mark" happens to coincide with certain boxes.

FWIW, I've had slips that don't read properly until the 3rd, 4th or even 5th time they're inserted, and I've had slips that looked fine cause the terminal to indicate that there are too many numbers selected (at least once when there were minor water spots after coming in fromthe rain). So far as I know I've never had a ticket printed in error, though there was one occasion when I didn't look at the ticket until later, and the numbers were completely different than what they should have been.

Obviously there will be occasional problems, and for that reason tickets should be able to be cancelled for a few minutes after they are issued. Of course the lottery has no incentive to allow that, since it certainly won't increase their sales, but will result in abit more overhead. Since tickets issued in error could result in a jackpot being split there is a possibility that the "victim" of such an incident might win a lawsuit against either the lottery or the agent. I'd love to see such a lawsuit, as long as I'm not the plaintiff.

I already posted, but I want to add something in response to some of the posts.

To avoid getting quick picks for the wrong game, just mark a card if that's an option in your state.   

Regarding all the responses like "what if my number comes up and I didn't buy it?" or "maybe it's an omen," if the odds are already so astronomical that only 1 combination in 23 million can win, and with games like PB and MM as much as 1 in 176 million, then what are the chances the one you don't buy will hit that night or even in the next 100 draws?  I mean, it's only 1 combination.  So why not play it over and over and over and over again if you think it's a sign?  Why is there a greater chance that night it will hit just because it's a mistake?  Maybe this belongs in Mystical.

Once I played my personal numbers and got 2 lines on the ticket instead of one.  It didn't hit me immediately, but the numbers were 13-20-27-34-41-48, so you can see that each number is +7 and it was a straight line down the card. (It was not a quick pick.)  Like others here, I thought "maybe this is a sign!"  It didn't win anything that night.  I couldn't get the numbers out of my head, because they're too easy to remember, so I played them a few times and then stopped.  Guess what?  They still haven't hit and that was months ago.  It was a smudge, dust or something in the terminal that caused it to scan incorrectly.  I guess if people want to believe it's a sign from above, it's no stranger than playing the numbers you just saw on a bar code in the frozen food section.

If play slip scanners were a new idea, I could understand because there are number of reason for false readings. But once they got the bugs out, it must be operator error unless all the clerks are having that problem. I've seen clerks try to insert slips 5 or 6 times and then watch another clerk clear the machine and the tickets are printed the first time.

Race tracks have machines where you put in $20 and make your own bets. The screens are 'how much', 'type of bet', and 'which horse'. After doing that the options are 'next bet', 'start over', 'print ticket', and 'finish'. If I make a win bet and press 'next bet', the machine is ready to accept another win bet but if I want to make another type of bet like a perfecta, I need to press 'start over'.

Lottery machines are similar and if the machine is ready to accept a pick-3 bet because the clerk didn't press 'start over' and tries to run Mega Million play slips, it might not read them. If the clerk didn't clear a previous bet that included multiple draws on a MM bet, it might add that bet to whatever is on a MM play slip. I'm not saying there can't be other causes but it seems more likely because other clerks have no problem running the same slips.

I don't know why Mega Millions tickets can't be canceled but unless the clerks are prepared to buy all mistakes, they should check which screen the machine is on before making that bet. Ohio has a 10-spot keno type game and we have to fill out one slip for each set of numbers we choose but it also has an option to add 9 QPs and/or play the same ticket for up to 14 future drawings. When the Lottery decided to put the game online, they must have been confident the slip readers wouldn't read a speck of dirt as future drawings or multiple QPs or were secretly laughing at the thought of clerks cancelling many tickets.

"Since tickets issued in error could result in a jackpot being split there is a possibility that the "victim" of such an incident might win a lawsuit against either the lottery or the agent. I'd love to see such a lawsuit, as long as I'm not the plaintiff."

Different subject but what if somebody who lived in a state that doesn't allow anonymity, spit the jackpot with someone in another state that does. Would a court rule that state must prove there was an actual winner and must divulge the name because it is public record?