Iowa Lottery

The Iowa Lottery is run by the government of Iowa. It is a charter member of, and home to, the Multi-State Lottery Association (MUSL), which administers its games on behalf of the member lotteries. The Iowa Lottery portfolio includes Hot Lotto, Mega Millions, Powerball, Lucky for Life, All or Nothing, Pick 3, Pick 4, plus numerous instant scratch ticket, InstaPlay and pull-tab games.

The largest prize won on an Iowa Lottery ticket was approximately $241 million; it was the only jackpot-winning ticket sold for the June 13, 2012 drawing of Powerball. A group of 20 cereal factory workers held claim to the ticket, choosing the $160 million (before withholdings) cash option.

Legislation creating Iowa's lottery was signed into law in April 1985; the Lottery began sales on August 22, 1985, with a kickoff celebration at the Iowa State Fair.

The first product sold by the Iowa Lottery was an instant-scratch game called Scratch, Match and Win; players bought more than 6.4 million tickets during its first week.

The Iowa Lottery has raised more than $1.7 billion for programs (reaching $1 billion in March 2006) while awarding more than $3.8 billion in prizes.

The Lottery sells tickets in four general categories: instant-scratch, InstaPlay, pull-tab and online games. Lottery products are sold at more than 2,400 retail locations.

The Iowa Lottery has over 100 employees who work at its headquarters in Clive and its regional offices in Cedar Rapids, Council Bluffs, Mason City and Storm Lake.

In 1994, Iowa became the first state in the US that required lottery players to be at least 21 years of age. (Louisiana became the second in 1998, followed by Arizona in 2003.)

In September 2007, the Iowa Lottery (along with the Kansas Lottery) began the first US multi-jurisdictional scratch game, Midwest Millions.

Iowa's Pick 3 and Pick 4 numbers were drawn by the Illinois Lottery at the WGN-TV studios in Chicago using their Pick 3 and Pick 4 results until April 16, 2014, when the Iowa Lottery began drawing their own numbers two months after WGN America, which previously televised all Illinois Lottery drawings, discontinued airing their 9pm newscasts, along with the diverging winning options for each game between each lottery over the years.

...
Wikipedia