Then why did it take so long for them to announce how many winners there were? First they said "at least one", and then they said "three". If everything was stored in a central database, they could have found out the exact figures (and a lot more) as soon as the last winning number was announced.
Maybe it's due to lack of coordination between states? Or maybe they need to do fraud checking, etc. by watching CCTV footage from the point of sale?
It's because of coordination between states. From the MegaMillions website:
> Unlike some multi-state or multi-country lotteries that have central offices, all Mega Millions duties are shared by member states as part of their membership in the game.
Each state handles their own tickets and they don't all use the same software systems to manage them.
I doubt they use recordings for fraud prevention. I'd be pretty upset if my winning lottery ticket were denied because the store lost the recording, or never had them. It's just too costly to record every purchase.
Actually the major source of fraud in most lotteries is the store owner . For small wins the ticket is taken back to the store to scan it to check for a win, the store owner will tell the buyer that it lost, or that it only won a much smaller prize, pay that out of the till and then claim the prize.
Especially in poor/immigrant communities where many player may not speak English or have internet access.
There was a story on here about an analyst for an oil company who worked out the random number sequence for a lottery in Ontario. He also analysed the winning claims and discovered that certain stores where claiming a disproportionate number of middle wins.
Most of these lotteries date from the late 80s/early 90s and there isn't a lot of profit in updating them.
I went to some talks about the database design for the UK lottery where they admitted they didn't think it would be so popular and so hadn't really considered sharding.
They also were surprised that the number weren't uniformly distributed. They assumed numbers would be picked totally randomly while the first win was all numbers that could be birthdays and so there was an unusual number of winners and it took several days to work out how many.
Maybe it's due to lack of coordination between states? Or maybe they need to do fraud checking, etc. by watching CCTV footage from the point of sale?