Re: that public lotteries [are] hard to manipulate.
The type of lottery like the one the picture* illustrating the article shows a ticket of are hard to manipulate. Because the winning number is generated live on the spot.
Stuff like the scratch cards (and any other lottery using predetermined winning numbers) leave far more room for manipulation, especially in the preventing of payouts.
Historic trivia time: New York gangster Dutch Schulz used to run a numbers game, aka an illegal lottery. Winning numbers and the amount of the winnings (this is the clever bit) were based on the results and quotas of horse races on a regular racetrack. This was in the 1920ies/1930ies - decades before pocket calculators or laptops or smartphones. So (the possibility of the race itself being fixed) the punters in the illegal lottery believed numbers were not manipulated by the mobsters running it - anyone could get the results and winning quotas from the horse races and check them. However, Schulz employed a guy who was some sort of savant and could do numbers in is head like a computer. He used that guys calculations to change the quotas on the racetrack by placing bets himself, thereby lowering the payouts from his own numbers racket.
*Why a German lottery ticket?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
