Virginia lottery flaw lets same people win repeatedly

The shortened title is misleading. The issue is with a lottery run by Virginia alcohol beverage control, liquor in VA is sold only in stores run by the ABC, to determine who gets the opportunity to purchase certain liquors which are available in very limited quantities.

IIUC, the issue is that RAND isn't random so when the entries were sorted the following entry had an above expected chance of also winning.

Honestly, I wonder if it would've been easier to just find a bingo set and do it that way.

Note: The prior year it was just alphabetical order so if your named started with a B or higher you didn't get any.

> Instructions for Processing Lottery Entries – 2023

> (1) Open the file sent from the Web Team.

> (2) Save in .xls, not .csv. Always keep a clean and un-changed original copy for the records.

> (3) The “Created” column has the date and time of submission to determine what submission was sent in first.

> (4) Delete rows with “Created” dates prior to lottery beginning and after lottery ending, if any.

> (5) Make sure that the column labeled “Create” has both date and time in the format. If not, then reformat this column to show both date and time as you will need both to de-duplicate the entries. Entries should be sorted from first to last.

> (6) Highlight all items and use Data/Remove Duplicates focusing on Street address and City.

> (7) Make an Excel Tab for each of the products being offered.

> (8) Copy the entry sheet onto the first tab and delete all products but the first product.

> (9) Delete any lines where the customer has answered “No” showing they are notinterested in entering for that product.

> (10) Repeat the step above with the other items until each tab has only one code and only lines where the customer has answered “Yes” that they want to enter for that product. You should have the same number of tabs as you have products being offered. The next steps will be repeated on each of the tabs until all tabs have had winners selected.

> (11) Create two new columns to the left of all your data.

> (12) Sort your data set on the tab by Create date/time, first to last. If you do not show “Time” you must re-format the data until the time shows.

> (13) Generate random numbers in column B using the formula: “= RAND()”. Repeat this formula down to the last line of the sheet.

> (14) Highlight the Random Number column and paste it using “Paste Special, Values and Number Formats”, into column A.

> (15) Sort Column A by smallest to largest.

> (16) Select the number of lines on the sheet equal to the number of winners for that product. These are your lottery winners. The remainder are non-winners.

> (17) Repeat one tab at a time for all items on the lottery

[1]: https://thebourbonculture.com/whiskey-essentials/virginia-ab...