Official Lottery is a free app that lets you keep track of the results for all of your favorite state lotteries in one place. You can get customized notifications about jackpots, winning numbers, and more. You can also use the app to scan your tickets and see if you’ve won. The app works well but it has a few problems: – The scanner is very slow compared to other apps that scan in seconds or less. – Sometimes it won’t read the ticket, but most of the time it will.

The first lotteries to sell tickets with a fixed prize—in cash or goods—appeared in the fourteen-hundreds in Europe, where towns used them to raise money for wall building and town fortifications, as well as for charity. By the fifteen-hundreds, they were a national phenomenon; Elizabeth I chartered her first lottery in 1567, setting aside the profits for “reparation of the Havens and Strength of the Realme.”

Lottery opponents raised ethical questions about whether governments ought to fund public services through gambling, and about how much states stood to gain. Devout Protestants were especially adamant, warning that government-sponsored lotteries were morally unconscionable. Nonetheless, America was deeply indebted and desperate for funds at the turn of the century, and state lotteries soon emerged as a key source of revenue. The Continental Congress used one to help finance the Revolutionary War, and Alexander Hamilton wrote that the lottery would “assure an equality of chances to all men for hazarding trifling sums.”