I feel that myself and 76 others were the unfortunate and unwilling victims of this computerized lottery spoken of here. This is they way things appeared to happen to me at he 500 million dollar Grand Finale held in Atlanta Aug 30.
We were 77 winners of a second chance to win 10 million dollars in the Georgia 500 million dollar Grande Finale. The questionable behavior began when a few days before this Grand Finale Event was to take place the Ga. Lottery sent questionaires to all the contestants asking personal questions ex: What is your occupation, What make and model car do you drive, Where were you born etc/ If this was to be a random drawing why do they need this information?
Then when we get to Atlanta we are put in a bus and taken across town to a studio where we are assigned seat numbers. Then we are photographed holding the seat numbers. Why were we assigned seat numbers.Why were we photographed holding our seat numbers? We were then sent away for a couple of hours. When we were brought back we were told to sit in our assigned seats and the "computer" would pick 40 people to advance to the next stage of the Grand Finale. The 40 people who were chosen were given purses that contained either a gold or silver coins. The 20 people with the gold coins advanced to the next stage. Guess who gave out the purses? The lottery staff of course.
The gold coins had numbers on them and billfolds were passed out according to the numbers. The billfolds with platinium markings advanced to the next round. Then the bubble machine picked 5 numbers that advanced to the next round. Then the lottery staff pushed the 5 giant 10 ft scratch offs out from behind a curtain in the order they wanted them lined up in, and assigned them to the contestants in the order they pushed them out in. Ex: contestant #1 gets the first card push out, contestant # 2 gets the second card pushed out,
When the cards were scratched off it left the two final contestants. One with a gold emblem and one with a green emblem. The final stage of the game had two safes. The one with the green emblem to be opened by the contestant who had the green emblemed giant scratch off and this of course was the winner.
To add insult to injury this whole thing was being taped and they kept stopping the game and redoing the contestants reactions and making the contestants left sitting in the assigned seats make excited surprised reactions over and over until they got it on tape like they wanted.
We were trapped we had no way to get back to our cars, we couldn't leave. We were told if we left we wouldn't get of free Falcon tickets.
IF this was truly a random game why not put all the names in a drum, they way they did the weekly drawings, and pull a name out.
If it was a contest to see who could answer their questionaire best then we should have been told so.
In any event there was no reason to keep 76 people confined for an entire day ,10 am till 6pm, for something that should have been done in one hour.