When a person buys a lottery ticket they expect certain things to happen. The person will scratch off their ticket and if they won they expect to see how much they won with the help of the lottery computer. What one does not expect is for winning tickets to lose and losing tickets to win but that is exactly what is happening in the South Carolina Education Lottery.

Officials of the State lottery have stated that a new computer system used in the lottery has created problems. The new system is not identifying the tickets correctly. Some tickets that are losing tickets have been counted as winners and winning tickets have been counted as losers. Officials also stated that some winning Powerball tickets were bought before the new computers were installed and now cannot be read.

Officials decided to change contractors who then installed new computers so retailers could sell lottery tickets twenty four hours a day. It seems as though the new contract has not been a good decision as the chaos it has recently caused. The new system was installed on November 5th.

The new contractor is Intralot and some tickets created by the old contractor Scientific Games are not being read. However, Lottery officials do say that most of the problems have been solved


- 2008-11-12