Senate approves lottery review spurred by VTDigger report

[T]he Vermont Senate adopted an amendment Monday calling for an investigation into lottery payouts, citing reporting by VTDigger that called attention to statistically unlikely winnings around the state.

“Some in the journalism profession use an expression: JDLR, just doesn’t look right,” said Senate President Pro Tem Tim Ashe, who proposed the amendment last week. The amendment, he said, “asks for an investigation to determine if something that ‘just doesn’t look right’ is on the up-and-up — or if there’s some need for policy reform.”

VTDigger’s investigation, portions of which were read on the Senate floor, found that some employees of lottery outlets or their relatives had won massive sums from 2011 to 2016. While lottery experts said those wins were statistically improbable, current leaders of Vermont’s lottery commission were not alarmed by the pattern.

Ashe said some members of the Senate Appropriations Committee felt those officials failed to address “the damage that a story like this can do to people’s perception that the lottery is being run properly. They weren’t quite appreciating how compromised it made [the program] look.”

Sen. John Rodgers, D-Essex-Orleans, said he hoped an investigation would lead to improvements in the lottery’s fairness. “I’ve known people who worked at some of those convenience stores,” he said. “And they could tell me which ticket was a winner before you scratched it, just by the code number.”

Gov. Phil Scott also called for a review of the lottery’s integrity after the investigation was published last week. Daniel Rachek, the program’s current director, said Thursday that he would submit a report by the end of May.

The Senate amendment is attached to H.571, a bill that proposes merging the state’s liquor and lottery commissions. With no debate over the merger, the Senate voted Monday to order the bill for a third reading.