Charlotte McDonald
speaker
483 appearances
11 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2012
last heard 11 Jun
Charlotte McDonald’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Since Lawrence broke his story, journalists have uncovered similar patterns of multiple winners.
They all ask themselves a simple question.
Can it be possible that some individuals are just that lucky?
In the US, lotteries are run on a state-by-state basis, and these lotteries can include a number of different types of games.
Ones where a random set of balls are generated by the lottery company, and you need to match those numbers with the ticket you bought.
Another set of games include scratch cards or scratchers, where you want to match symbols or numbers.
This year, Jeff Kelly-Lewenstein and a group of journalists and students tried to get a fuller national picture.
When they collated the data, it certainly seemed like they were onto something.
The team found that in the past seven years, close to 1,700 players across several states have each claimed 50 or more lottery tickets worth at least $600.
But to find out if their suspicions were reasonable, they enlisted some statistical help from Philip Stark, Professor of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley.
Instead, Philip created a thought experiment.
Using the most generous parameters and assuming that people played in the most optimal way, he asked, what are the chances of winning as frequently as those who top the list for each state?
For example, in Pennsylvania, the most prolific winner had won a prize on scratch cards 209 times over a 12-year period.
Philip said, OK, let's imagine that every person in the state plays this game.
All 12 million people would each have to spend $7.8 million to have a 1 in 10 million chance that any one of them would win 209 times.
We know in reality that not all 12 million people in the state played the lottery over this period.
And yet the chances of replicating someone getting 209 wins is still one in 10 million.
Again and again, Philip found it would have taken a lot of money and a huge number of people to be playing to expect to find these multiple wins by chance.
But if it's not luck, what's going on?
Well, we don't know for sure.
Showing 401–420 of 483 · page 21 of 25
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