The New York Lottery’s official lottery website provides a variety of services, including tracking lottery results and finding physical retailers. You can also purchase tickets online using secure state-regulated platforms.

Lottery results are updated as soon as the drawing takes place. Check out the latest winning numbers and prize payouts for all games. You can also find a full list of past winners for Powerball and Mega Millions.

Despite their early successes, however, lotteries became notorious for mismanagement and corruption. The infamous Louisiana State Lottery Company marketed its game nationwide and sent mailers to all fifty states, which eventually led Congress to prohibit interstate promotion in 1890, bringing an end to the first era of state-run lotteries in America.

This change in public perception shifted the politics of lotteries. Opponents questioned both the ethical merits of funding state programs through gambling and how much money states really stood to gain. They hailed from all political parties and walks of life, but many were devout Protestants who viewed gambling as morally unconscionable. (Cohen cites the astonishing fact that bingo games sponsored by Catholic high schools took in more than the entire state’s lottery jackpots at the time.)

In the end, Cohen argues, growing awareness of the money to be made in gambling collided with a crisis in state funding in the nineteen-sixties. In a world of swelling populations, rising inflation, and the Vietnam War, it became increasingly difficult to balance state budgets without raising taxes or cutting services—both of which were politically toxic with voters.