After a two week lull in the action (which may have been induced by lack of visible results), Michigan announced a program bringing the count of state sponsors to seventeen. A couple others are faking it, and still others offer lesser rewards, sometimes in mass quantities1.
Corporate citizens — Kroger Health and United Airlines — have made their own moves, and the city of Philadelphia is running another experiment (mostly with U. Penn funds and organization). Polk County IA (Des Moines) and St. Louis MO have gotten tired of waiting for their states to act, Dallas is thinking about it. Guam and Virgin Islands have their own programs, on smaller scales.
Here’s a running summary of statewide jackpots. At this posting, we’re the most complete, current and accurate summary on the web. The National Governors Association maintains one including non-jackpot awards (like Alabama’s two laps around the Talladega Speedway2), though it tends to be out of date with major errors and omissions. (NGA’s 6/15 update is a considerable improvement.) There are worse efforts by People, Newsweek, Cheapism.com … not worth your time.
Timelines, Official Sites, Top Cash Prizes.
5/4/2021: @NormOrnstein tweets: “My suggestion: a vaccine lottery …”.
5/10: KY offers free tix to one of its lottery games. (See “fraudery”.)
5/12: OH Gov. DeWine announces Vax-A-Million. (Rapidly revised.) 5 $1M prizes.
5/20: MD Gov. Hogan announces VaxCash. $400K, 40x$40K.
5/20: NY Gov. Cuomo announces Vax & Scratch “fraudery”.
5/21: OR Gov. Brown announces Take Your Shot Oregon. $1M, 36x10K3.
5/25: CO Gov. Polis announces Colorado Comeback Cash. 5x$1M.
5/25: DE Gov. Carney announces DE Wins! $302K (plus two low-number license plates), 10x$5K.
5/25 AR Gov. Hutchinson announces vaccination incentive fraudery.
5/27: CA Gov. Newsom announces Vax for the Win. 10x$1.5M, 30x$50K.
6/1: NM Gov. Lujan Grisham announces Vax 2 the Max. $5M, 4x$250K4.
6/3: WA Gov. Inslee announces Shot of a Lifetime. $1M, 4x$250K.
6/4: WV Gov. Justice announces Do It For Babydog: Save a life, Change your life. $1.588M, 5x$1M, $588K5. (Pre-announced 5/27.)
6/4: KY Gov. Beshear announces Shot At A Million. 3x$1M.
6/10: NC Gov. Cooper announces Your Shot at $1 Million. 4x$1M.
6/15: MA Gov. Baker announces Mass VaxMillions. 5x$1M.
6/16: ME Gov. Mills announces Don’t Miss Your Shot: Vaccinationland Sweepstakes. Winner gets $1 for every Mainer vaxxed by July 4 (roughly $1M).
6/17: IL Gov. Pritzker announces All In For The Win. 3x$1M, 40x$100K (partly by region).
6/17: NV Gov. Sisolak announces Vax Nevada Days. $1M, 3x$250K, 11x$50K, 32x$25K, 100x$1K.
6/18 LA Gov. Edwards announces Shot At A Million. $1M, 4x$100K.
7/1 MI Gov. Whitmer announces MI Shot To Win Sweepstakes. $2M, $1M, 30x$50K.
Lottery or Fraudery?
NY pitches a $5M grand prize. AR, two $1M jackpots. KY (originally), $225K/day. All are premised on free tix to a heavily-subscribed games already in progress. Best I can calculate, 99.7% of those prizes are won by players who entered the old fashioned way: Vaccinated or not, they bought their tickets.
Don’t tell the vaccination laggards, but this scheme is even cheesier than it looks.
When the state gives you a free ticket to an ongoing state lottery, they don’t add a dollar to the prize pool. At best, they dilute everybody’s odds a little. At worst they’re taking money from one state budget account, running it thru the state lottery apparatus where private lottery-operations vendors take a cut, and returning what’s left to another state budget account.
Down-Tier Prizes
Traditional lottery designs spend a lot of the prize pool on numerous small prizes so they can advertise an attractive “odds of winning”.
CA offers $50 gift cards — two million of ‘em!
NM takes 10 “prize wheels”out for a spin at participating providers.
DE6 offers genuine minor-league prizes: passes to low-A minor league baseball (almost as minor as you can get), among other door-prizes.
WV’s colorful down-tier spread includes 10 customized “Rocky Ridge” pickup trucks, 50 rifles, 50 shotguns, 50 lifetime hunting/fishing licenses, and 125 weekend getaways to state parks.
WA offers a big spread of non-cash odds & ends. Stadium suites and X-Box’s instead of pickup trucks and shotguns, but we all like our state parks.
NY state has sports tix and park passes too, and NYC has its own grab bag of incentives.
AR’s 100K prizes are your choice of a $20 lottery ticket or a $21 state hunting/fishing license.
Where Do They Get the Money?
Federal COVID relief funds — CARES Act and/or American Rescue Plan — are the usual source.
Oddly, MD stuck with state lottery promotional funds.
AR and NY aren’t playing with real money.
Catchy Names, Slogans, Mascots and Spokes-critters
NY “Vax & Scratch”.7 OH “Vax-A-Million”. MA “Mass VaxMillion”. MD “VaxCash”. CA “Vax for the Win”. NM “Vax 2 The Max NM”. NV “Vax Nevada Days”. OR “Take Your Shot, Oregon”. WA “Shot of Lifetime. KY “Shot At A Million”. LA also “Shot At A Million”. NC “Your Shot at $1 Million”. MN “Your Shot to Summer”. CO “Colorado Comeback Cash”. DE “DE Wins”. IL “All In For The Win”. To the best of my knowledge, AR hasn’t thought of a name.
The “MI Shot To Win Sweepstakes” is billed as a “lottery-style raffle”, covering all descriptive bases.
Lottery mascots — usually a poor sap in a lotto ball costume — are in evidence.
WV is trying to corner the slogan market with “Call to Arms”, “Beat the 588 … Bad”, “West Virginia Strong VIP”, and now officially “Do it for Babydog: Save a life, Change your life” with a promise that Gov. Justice’s pet bulldog “Babydog” will give the winner a high-five8.
How Do I Sign Up?
Most states rely on their statewide immunization databases. If you’re in the file, you’re in the lottery.
Why wouldn’t you be in your state’s database? Maybe you got your shot in a different state, or in the military or at the VA (which ordinarily don’t update the states). Maybe your provider, or their larger network, or your county or state health department got backlogged.
Maybe you’re on file, but somebody along the line typo’d one digit in your phone number or one letter in your name or abbreviated your street address differently. Maybe you’re a Steven/Steve/Stephen. Maybe you moved or changed phone #’s. Maybe you are homeless, or phoneless, or ID-less. Maybe your handwriting is impossible.
If you are left out, you probably won’t know … you just won’t win
CO and WA let you check online if you’re in the system. Early findings do not instill confidence. As of 5/27, 11% of known vaccinations had not yet reached the CO database. Coloradans vaccinated by the VA were left out entirely — but they’ve built a bridge between databases. (Military members likewise, bridge under construction?) WA hit their first drawing without including either group.
Other states use opt-in entry systems.
In Ohio you can entry via a web portal, or by phone to the Dept. of Health main call center.9
WV has an online entry system and a phone option— but the phone option is voicemail. Many of those messages will not be transcribed correctly.
NM is an opt-in system with no phone option! Tough luck for the digitally challenged, who make up a large fraction of the unvaccinated.
KY has a website and a phone option.
MA will have a website and a call center, registration opens July 1.
LA is an opt-in system, details pending.
MI has an opt-in website, “powered by” regional superstore chain Meijer. Phone entrants go thru the state COVID hotline, apparently to voicemail with the usual downsides.
Can Everybody Play?
In general, no.
Standard lottery exclusions apply — employees and family of the responsible agencies.
Most games are limited to state residents, with good ID, and with usable contact info.
You also lose out if you can’t find your vaccination card. (This should not be a fatal error. For a $1M game they should be able to consult the state vax database, then provider records, and as a last resort use high-end serologic assay as suggested in Jackpots for Vacc Shots Part I.)
Residents who got their shots out of state face restrictions. CO and OR residents can get themselves added, with some considerable bother. To the best of my knowledge, NM, WA, CA, MD and DE residents who received their shots out of state have no route into their states’ Immunization Information Systems.
In various states, you can’t win if you are an incarcerated felon, or undocumented, or a permanent resident alien — all part of the contagion pool, but not the lottery pool.
In Ohio, you must be a U.S. citizen, and not serving hard time for a felony. WA doesn’t check citizenship, but will give your prize to the next guy if you’re in county jail D&D for the night of the drawing.
In MA you must be fully vaxxed before opting in, and you must have gotten your shot(s) in the state.
And if you’re under 18, you can’t legally play the big games with the big boys.
Won’t Somebody Think of the Children?
For residents under 18, OH awards a full-ride scholarship to any state public institution along with each of the 5 jackpots. As in other states, this is an order of magnitude smaller than the adult value proposition.10
OR awards 5 scholarships. WV 10. KY 15. NY’ers can register to win one of 50 scholarships to SUNY or CUNY. CO will grant one full ride, and another 25X$50K grants. DE offers one full ride — but only for teens vaccinated from 5/25 to 6/30. WA distributes 30 1-year scholarship grants, plus $1M to public institutions to redistribute to vaccinated students as they see fit. NC 4x$125K. IL 20x$150K. LA 9x$100K. MA a generous 5x$300K. (But still less generous than the grown-ups’ shares — why?)
NV spreads 10x$50K, 25x$20K, 100x$5K. No full rides there. MI offers four-year tuition and fees, but not room and board (or books?).
CA has no scholarship plan. A 12-year-old can win the whole $1.5M — but can’t touch it til they turn 18.
No under-18 option at all for NM.
Is the Game for New Jabs Only?
In all 10 of the first 10 jackpot states, you are eligible for the big money no matter when you got your shot. That’s good.
NC broke the mold. Everyone vaccinated gets one chance in the draw, but NC’ers who get vaxxed from 6/10 on get double chances.
Down-tier prizes tend to be “point of sale” — they hand you a gift card when and where you get vaccinated. That’s understandable.
DE’s 10 $5K prizes are an exception — they are reserved for adults vaccinated between 5/25/and 6/29.
In some cases you can’t collect your winnings until you are fully vaxxed — two shots for Pfizer or Moderna.
Can Winners Be Anonymous?
Yes in MD, DE, CA and maybe others — I haven’t chewed thru all the fine print. But states really want visible winners to publicize and promote — that’s the whole point of the game. Ohio’s first jackpot and scholarship winners are virtual rock stars now.
Who Else Has a VIP Scheme?
Hong Kong will raffle off a $1.4M apartment.
In Poland, you can win ONE MILLION ZLOTYS!
United Airlines and Kroger Health have big-ticket prize schemes, and they certainly won’t be the last commercial entries in the goodwill derby. (See vaccines.gov for a CDC compilation of private industry incentives.)
Hackers and scammers have ideas too. There are scam warnings from OH, CA and the FBI (though sponsoring agencies still haven’t locked up the obvious lookalike domain names).
MN will distribute up to 100,000 awards in the $20-$100 “door prize” range — sports tix, theme park rides, fishing licenses etc.
16 and over, sorry, in your own vehicle, sorry, behind a pace car at highway speed only. Sorry.
One to each county. Good odds if you’re vaccinated and living in a sparsely-populated county where most folks are convinced the whole business is a hoax.
One to each of 4 regional health districts.
“588” represents 588,000 West Virginians who at one point were eligible but not vaccinated.
DE will also make cash grants to businesses who offer creative incentives to their customers (not to owners or employees).
As if allergy sufferers didn’t have enough to worry about. NY also dubs its park pass giveaway “A Shot in the Park” … a traumatic trigger, no doubt, for the many New Yorkers who actually have been shot in the park.
Or maybe Babydog will lick your PowerBalls.
At the cut-off for Week 1, only half of eligible Ohioans had entered. In Week 3, two million eligibles still had not signed up.
Why the short-sheeting of residents age 12-17? Maybe a preemptive strike against a generation that will soon be dismissing their elders’ opinions with a breezy “OK Millennial”.