Why The Mega Millions Jackpot Is Extra-Important For New Hampshire

Jason Kessenich / Flickr

The Mega Millions jackpot is creating a spike in lotto sales all over the country

It’s a good day to be the New Hampshire Lottery Commission.  The AP reports the commission is seeing sales on the order of “27,000 transactions an hour.”  It’s all thanks to tonight’s Mega Millions Lottery, which, at $540 million, has ascended to Largest Lottery Jackpot In The World, Ever status.

It’s probably safe to expect news reports in the coming days (or weeks) documenting a dramatic spike in New Hampshire Lottery revenues.

While the Mega Millions frenzy is certainly a good thing for any state that plays the game, that goes double for the Granite State, which has struggled with declining lotto revenues for years.  So in honor of the historic jackpot–and to give you a bit of context–we’ve reposted one of our most popular series to date.  “Losing The Lotto” documents the people, facts, and figures behind the New Hampshire Lottery, and the state’s struggles against the larger, and more successful, Massachusetts Lottery.

Losing The Lotto: What The New Hampshire Lottery Pays For:  Our first installment of the series tackles the basics of what you need to know about how the state lotto works and maps its steady revenue decline over the years.

Losing The Lotto: Where The Revenue Comes From:  In this short post, we chart out which games are the big money makers for the state, and explain why.

Losing The Lotto: Waiting For Massachusetts:  A little break from the numbers-crunching, we document our quest to gather usable data from the New Hampshire Lottery’s arch-rival.

Losing The Lotto: How A Massachusetts Gas Station Is Eating Into NH’s Education Funding: We take you out of the realm of charts and graphs and take you to an unlikely gambling wonderland right across (and we do mean right across) the border.

Losing The Lotto: Comparing NH’s Lotto Prizes To Massachusetts: We continue or border store escapades, looking at the issue from the other side of the stateline:  the Salem, NH businesses that can’t unload lotto tickets.  And then we use data to explain why.

Losing The Lotto: How Much Would Having Keno Help NH’s Revenues?: Expanded gaming–be it adding Keno to the Lottery Commission’s menu of offerings or opening a full-scale casino–is a controversial issue in the Granite State.  We talk with New Hampshire Lottery Executive Director Charlie McIntyre about the relative merits of Keno, and whether not having the game is actually hurting the state’s revenues.  Then we crunch some numbers to see if he’s right.

Why It Doesn’t Really Matter That Powerball Prices Are Doubling: Although not technically part of our “Losing The Lotto” series, it’s a quick that draws on previous reporting and provides some food for thought.