HARRISBURG – On Saturday night, many people will be watching the evening drawing of the Pennsylvania Lottery to see if they are a millionaire.
The drawing will be decided by an Automated Drawing Machine to select 7,777 winning tickets at random from all of the Millionaire Raffle tickets sold.
In this drawing, the lottery will award five top prizes of $1 million cash, five prizes of $100,000 cash, 200 prizes of $1,000 cash, and 7,567 prizes of $100 cash for a total of 7,777 prizes worth $6,456,700.
The millionaire raffle will immediately follow Saturday’s live drawing of the Daily Number, BIG 4 and CASH 5. The Automated Drawing Machine will then select the winning numbers for the millionaire raffle. This same method selected the winning ticket numbers in the lottery’s first three millionaire raffle drawings on Dec. 31, 2005; July 4, 2006; and Dec. 30.
The ADM selection of the five, $1 million top-prize raffle ticket numbers and the five, $100,000 second-prize raffle ticket numbers will be televised live. The 200 winning raffle ticket numbers for the $1,000 prizes and the 7,567 winning raffle ticket numbers for the $100 prizes will be selected at the same time, but the selection of these 7,767 winning tickets will not be televised due to time constraints.
An Automated Drawing Machine or Random Number Generator is a highly secure computerized system that generates numbers in a random manner. ADMs have been used by lotteries for many years. The Pennsylvania Lottery first used an ADM for the “Hearts and Diamonds” game in the mid-1990s and has used random number generation over the years to facilitate many of its second-chance drawings.
The Lottery currently uses an ADM to randomly select the numbers for the mid-day drawings of the Daily Number, BIG 4 and Treasure Hunt. Other lotteries, both in the United States and internationally, also utilize ADMs for the random selection of their winning numbers.
The ADM has been certified by Gaming Laboratories International, the world’s premier gaming products and systems testing company.
A Pennsylvania Lottery drawing official will operate the ADM by pressing a button that will activate the ADM to begin the winning ticket number selection process. Viewers will see the winning ticket numbers for the top two prize tiers displayed on the ADM monitor as they are selected at random. In addition, the winning ticket information will be printed in report form and properly recorded on certification forms by the on-site Certified Public Accountant.
A complete list of all 7,777 winning Millionaire Raffle numbers will be available on the lottery’s Web site – as well as at local Lottery retail locations – the next day, due to the total number of winning tickets, more than in any of the previous Millionaire Raffle drawings.