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States Consider Awarding Lottery Winners Something Else: Anonymity

A woman playing the lottery last week in Raleigh, N.C., where state lawmakers recently rejected a law that would keep the identities of winners private.Credit...Emily Rhyne for The New York Times

RALEIGH, N.C. — If you are lucky enough to win the lottery here, there is one thing you are virtually certain to lose: your privacy.

Like most of the 44 states with lotteries, North Carolina considers the identities of winners of large prizes to be a matter of public record. But this year, in which winners already have come forward more than 40 times to claim awards that the state later publicized, lawmakers have considered whether the winners should be allowed to collect their money without having their names disclosed.

At the urging of lottery officials who warned that anonymity would threaten the appeal of the games — and ultimately the revenue that flows into the state’s treasury — a legislative committee rejected the proposal last week. The issue, though, has surfaced in at least 10 states in recent years, and industry executives believe it will continue to be a subject of debate at a time when dozens of state governments rely on lotteries to relieve their strained budgets.

“I think it’s the curse of the lottery that your name is out there forever,” said Patrick Nowlin, who lives in southern Wisconsin and won a $41 million Powerball jackpot in 2007. “You’ve always got to keep looking out for a scam. Even after seven years, every once in a while I get a suspicious phone call.”

But lottery executives insist that disclosure, not just clever marketing or visions of tropical getaways, is the foundation of the public’s interest and confidence in the games they offer.

“It’s the best way we have of assuring our players that we offer honest and fair games, that anyone has a chance to win,” said Alice Garland, the executive director of North Carolina’s lottery, which had more than $1.8 billion in sales in the 2014 fiscal year. “If you don’t provide the winners’ names, then I think it becomes suspicious as to whether there really are winners or not.”

A handful of lotteries, including those in Delaware, Kansas and Maryland, already allow winners to keep their identities private. Others allow trusts, instead of individuals, to claim prizes. But with sweeping secrecy offered only rarely, critics say the lotteries are exploiting winners by claiming that they are merely guarding the integrity of the games.

“Lottery officials are just more than willing to sell these people out and throw them to the wolves by the publicizing of their faces and their names so they can sell more lottery tickets the next time around,” said Andrew Stoltmann, a lawyer in Chicago who has represented lottery winners. “I think it’s unconscionable that they do it, but there’s a real financial incentive.”

For those who do win and live in states where anonymity is not an option, the lottery brings not only a sudden rush of wealth, but also renown. Many winners move, change their telephone numbers and vanish from social media.

In North Carolina, State Representative Darren G. Jackson is quick to recall how his father, who once won a $1 million Powerball prize, received a tidal wave of entreaties, unsolicited calls and questionable business offers. Mr. Jackson wrote the anonymity proposal here, but says that his father’s experience was not what motived him. Instead, he said, he worries about threats to winners, including violence.

“There’s a lot of government records that are not published because they’re sensitive in nature,” Mr. Jackson said. “Just because this isn’t a state secret doesn’t mean it’s not important to keep someone’s name confidential.”

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A legislative panel in North Carolina last week. Lawmakers were weighing privacy issues against the state’s interest in showing the public that its games are fair.Credit...Emily Rhyne for The New York Times

But Ms. Garland, the lottery official, described Mr. Jackson’s proposal as “a solution in search of a problem,” and State Representative D. Craig Horn, another opponent, said he worried that the plan would weaken trust in public institutions.

“What if we didn’t tell anybody who won the lottery?” he said. “How do I know it wasn’t one of the lottery officials? How do I know it wasn’t an elected official who happened to chair the committee that had oversight of the lottery? How do I know it wasn’t the guy who donated a lot of money to someone’s campaign?”

He added, “The right of the public to know overrides the right to privacy, and I’m a big privacy guy.”

Even among supporters of anonymity, there is no consensus about how states should help. Although some states, like North Carolina, have considered offering winners nearly total anonymity, other approaches have also percolated in legislatures across the country.

This year in Georgia, a State Senate bill proposed allowing winners to remain anonymous, but only if they agreed to donate 25 percent of their winnings back to the lottery to finance college scholarships. Arizona legislators are considering a plan that would keep lottery winners’ names confidential for 90 days. And in New York, a bill pending in the State Assembly would ban the lottery from mandating that winners “perform any public actions in connection with the awarding, payment or collection of” prizes. (Anonymity proposals often include explicit exemptions that would allow lotteries to disclose winners’ identities to other government agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service.)

So far, though, few states have been willing to press ahead with any plans that could undermine the games, and the revenues that accompany them.

“It’s not a black-and-white issue, but I think the majority of states at this point have leaned to the side of openness and transparency,” said Terry Rich, the chief executive of the Iowa Lottery and the president of the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries.

Beyond concerns about openness, there are questions about whether anonymity would even be effective in communities where news travels fast and word of lottery jackpots is part of the local fabric.

“Remaining anonymous would be really hard to do unless you live in a really highly populated area, and you wanted to remain anonymous,” said W. Randy Smith, who in 2010 won a $79 million Powerball jackpot in West Virginia.

Even if West Virginia allowed winners to keep their names private, Mr. Smith is not certain he could have maintained his anonymity: It would have been hard, he said, for no one to learn that the county’s magistrate judge had become a millionaire overnight.

“Everybody’s going to have different problems depending on what they win, where they win, and who they are,” said Mr. Smith, who also won a lottery prize last year in Florida. He supports allowing players to decide whether their names are released.

Mr. Rich expects states to continue considering anonymity policies, but any changes are unlikely to offer relief to people like Mr. Nowlin, the winner from Wisconsin, whose name would remain on the Internet or in newspaper archives. And so the pleas he receives for cash — and the requests for more unusual items, like soil from his yard — could continue, even if they are less frequent these days.

“Somebody gets lucky,” he said last week, “and everybody thinks you’re going to share.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 11 of the New York edition with the headline: States Consider Awarding Lottery Winners Something Besides Money: Anonymity. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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