Iowa Lottery is watching Illinois’ new online sales

CEDAR RAPIDS - Lottery game Mega Millions' projected record jackpot of one-half billion dollars for its Friday drawing will be sending Iowans giddily to convenience stores and grocery-store lines to put down a dollar or more on the thinnest sliver of a chance to win.

Contemplate this, though, as you stand in the convenience store line with your bottle of pop and your package of chips: That next door in Illinois, you would be able to buy your ticket on your computer or smartphone via the Internet.

Just this week, the Illinois Lottery became the first lottery in the United States to legally permit the online purchase of lottery tickets.

“We are pioneering this in North America,” Illinois Lottery spokesman Mike Lang said this week. “But all the lotteries around the country and in North America are looking at it.”

Yes, the Iowa Lottery is watching, spokeswoman Mary Neubauer said.

She said Iowa Lottery officials have been talking about online sales for the last couple of years because they have known online sales would be coming elsewhere in the United States.

“There's been no huge public outcry for Internet lottery sales here in Iowa, so we would not anticipate anything soon here,” Neubauer said. “ ... (But) we're watching what is happening around the country, including what just started in Illinois.”

Neubauer said the Iowa Lottery believes it has the authority to conduct lottery sales on the Internet, but she said the agency would work with state lawmakers on any details of such a program expansion.

Sen. Tom Courtney, D-Burlington, chairman of the Oversight Committee, said he wasn't sure that the Iowa Lottery needed legislative support in order to sell lottery tickets online. The Iowa Lottery, though, might want to see if there was legislative support, he said.

The Iowa Legislature, he noted, has talked about online poker, but not online lottery sales.

“Right now, my opinion is that we wouldn't want to do that, but things can change,” Courtney said.

The Illinois Lottery's Lang said his state's General Assembly last year approved selling lottery tickets online as part of a pilot program to be conducted over three to four years. Then in December, the U.S. Justice Department, in response to requests from the states of Illinois and New York, issued a legal opinion allowing the Internet sale of lottery tickets to adults within a state.

The Illinois Lottery began the sale of tickets for two lottery games, Mega Millions and Lotto, via the Internet on Sunday.

Sales, Lang said, started slowly. In the first two days, residents had spent only about $57,000 in online lottery purchases in a state where customers at retail outlets were spending $5,600 a minute for a large Mega Millions jackpot in recent days.

He said lottery players tend to be a little older while adults who use computers tend to be a little younger and to be more comfortable using computers to make purchases.

The Iowa Lottery's Neubauer said the Internet sale of lottery tickets is a way to “modernize” delivery, and she noted that people can now place online bets on horse races in Iowa.