The New Mexico Lottery is adding raffle drawings to its line-up of games with the first drawing scheduled for New Year’s Eve.
Starting Sunday, tickets can be purchased for the New Year’s Eve Raffle, which will offer players the best odds ever to win four top prizes of $125,000.
The raffle will be easy to play. Players will simply buy their tickets. There will be no play slips to complete or numbers to choose. Tickets will be printed from lottery terminals in numeric order as they are sold statewide. Only 125,000 raffle tickets will be available for purchase.
With their limited ticket availability, raffle games will bring a different kind of excitement to New Mexico Lottery players.
“Raffle games start a countdown among players because every ticket sold represents one less ticket to buy,” Romero said. “The countdown on the diminishing availability of tickets will make the days leading up to the New Year’s Eve drawing a more suspenseful event.”
Priced at $10 each, raffle tickets will be available at all lottery retailers statewide. The odds of winning a top prize are one in 31,250.
A total of 106 winning raffle ticket numbers will be drawn on New Year’s Eve. In addition to the top prizes, winning ticket numbers will be drawn for a $50,000 prize, a $25,000 prize and 100 prizes of $500 each. Winning tickets must match all numbers drawn in exact order.
After the drawing, all winning ticket numbers will be available on the lottery’s website at www.nmlottery.com and at lottery headquarters in Albuquerque. Lottery retailers can also electronically scan raffle tickets to identify winning tickets.
The raffle’s timing with New Year’s Eve enhances the tickets’ versatility as fun entertainment and thoughtful holiday gifts, end-of-year employee recognition awards and hostess gifts. The lottery plans to schedule other raffle games in 2008.
4 This Way! Game Ends
Raffle games will replace 4 This Way! - sales for which were down 17 percent in Fiscal
Year 2007. Last year, 4 This Way! accounted for less than one half of one percent of total sales.
The last drawing for 4 This Way! will be conducted on Oct. 27. Players with winning
4 This Way! tickets will have 90 days from the date of a specific drawing to claim prizes.
$328 Million Raised for Education
Net revenues from the sale of all New Mexico Lottery games benefit the Legislative Lottery Scholarship program, which provides in-state tuition assistance for New Mexico residents attending public colleges and universities.
Since its inception in 1996, the lottery has raised more than $331 million for college tuition and school construction and repairs in New Mexico. In the last decade, more than 43,000 students have received Legislative Lottery Scholarships and approximately 15,000 of those students have graduated from college.
As of the Spring 2006
semester, 12,900 high school graduates from Bernalillo County have
received nearly $61 million in Legislative Lottery Scholarships to attend
college. More than 4,400 of those students have graduated from college.
Information on Legislative Lottery Scholarships is available at
www.nmlottery.com
