Possible cost of SC lottery glitch balloons to $35 million; still no word on payouts
While thousands of South Carolina lottery players remain in lotto limbo after a Christmas Day game glitch, lottery officials now say the potential cost of that glitch has nearly doubled.
The S.C. Education Lottery could be on the hook for as much as $35 million in payouts to people who bought Holiday Cash Add-A-Play tickets during a two-hour window on Dec. 25. But it’s still not clear whether those payments will be made.
Some 42,000 winning tickets, with a prize of at least $500 each, were mistakenly printed due to a programming error by the lottery’s computer system vendor, Intralot, officials have said.
For a roughly two-hour window Dec. 25, tickets were printed with the same play symbol, a Christmas tree, appearing in all nine available play areas on the ticket, resulting in a top prize of $500, officials have said. No more than five identical play symbols should appear for a single play.
Some of those tickets were worth multiple plays, meaning extra winnings above $500, which caused the original payout estimate of $19.6 million to balloon to $35.5 million, said Tim Madden, a lawyer for the lottery commission.
But after the lottery commission met Tuesday – nearly a month after the tickets were mistakenly printed – officials still have not decided whether to pay the winnings. They are commissioning an independent review of what happened Dec. 25 and will await those results before deciding, officials said.
“It makes sense to me that any player who thought they won and has not been able to redeem their claim would be upset,” Madden said. “But ... anyone looking at this objectively would say it doesn’t make sense that for two hours on Christmas Day that this particular game printed nine Christmas trees when it was only designed to print five.”
The South Carolina law governing the lottery says “a prize must not be paid” if it results from game tickets that are “produced or issued in error.”
The ongoing investigation is to determine whether the Christmas Day glitch meets the law’s definition for a situation where prizes should not be paid, Madden said.
“I think it’s unfortunate, and it’s a very difficult situation for the commission to be in,” Madden said. “The players are the lifeblood of this organization, and it’s important that the players know that this commission has their best interest at heart and that this commission’s going to do everything they can to make sure they make the right decision and is not going to make any decision flippantly.”
Asked if the potential payouts for this error could affect scholarships granted by the lottery, Madden said that would depend on the performance of the overall lottery for the fiscal year.
The lottery commission is scheduled to meet again Feb. 7, though Madden said it’s unlikely the investigation will have been completed and a decision on payouts made by that time.
This story was originally published January 23, 2018 at 3:07 PM with the headline "Possible cost of SC lottery glitch balloons to $35 million; still no word on payouts."