The official lottery is a lottery game that you can play on your phone for a chance to win big. Get Powerball & Mega Millions jackpots, or play fun daily games with more chances for winning!

Official lottery games from your state are a great way to spend your time, and it’s free. Just download the app, purchase tickets from a licensed lottery retailer in your state, and play!

While you’re playing, you’ll enjoy the feeling of winning. Just like other gambling games, the lottery is random and doesn’t account for your personality or social status or any other factor that makes you who you are.

It’s also regressive: The lottery disproportionately benefits wealthy people, college students, and school districts far from the neighborhoods where lottery retailers are located. That money can be a major source of inequality, the Howard Center found.

What’s more, because lotteries are so regressive, they actually hurt poor people. In a study, the Howard Center found that lottery retailers were often grouped in low-income communities and that these retailers were more likely to be located in Black or Latino neighborhoods.

After the initial boom of legalized lotteries, advocates realized that they couldn’t rely on the lottery as their statewide silver bullet, but had to find other ways to bring in revenue. In New Jersey, for instance, where proponents had imagined lottery proceeds on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars, the first year’s income barely covered about two per cent of the state’s total revenue.