How Powerball and Mega Millions balls are made, tested, and drawn

Powerball numbers come out of two gravity-driven machines called the Halogen II, built by Smartplay International. One holds the 69 white balls and the other the 26 red Powerballs. The game switched to them for the September 30, 2020 drawing, and at the same time replaced its hard rubber balls with solid foam ones, which the Multi-State Lottery Association called the new industry standard for gravity-driven machines.

The drawings happen at the Florida Lottery's studio in Tallahassee, Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday nights at 10:59 p.m. Eastern. The machines and ball sets live in a vault deep inside the lottery's headquarters, behind an alarmed, coded door that takes two keys, LotteryUSA reported in a look at drawing security. At least three people have to be there when it opens, a lottery security agent, a Multi-State Lottery Association representative, and an independent auditor. Florida's director of security and deputy director each get an email when it does.

There are four ball sets in that vault, and nobody knows in advance which one a drawing will use. Before a set goes into service, a state lab checks each ball's weight, size, and density, and the balls can be X-rayed to make sure nothing is inside. Each one weighs about 80 grams, and the average difference between balls is about 0.3 grams. Handlers wear latex gloves so oil from their skin doesn't change how a ball moves. A set lasts about two to three years.

On drawing night, two machines are chosen at random from several in the vault, tested, and run through a dress rehearsal before the live draw. When they aren't in use they sit under black shrouds. Officials quoted in that report included Sue Dooley, senior drawing manager for the Multi-State Lottery Association, and Ron Cave, Florida's lottery security director.

Mega Millions

Mega Millions is drawn in Atlanta at 11 p.m. Eastern on Tuesdays and Fridays, from 70 white balls and 24 gold Mega Balls kept in separate sets. The Georgia Lottery describes how its drawings are secured in its player FAQ. “Our security department and an independent auditing firm attend and monitor each step,” it says. Each machine and ball set goes through pre-drawing tests, several sealed ball sets are kept for each game with one picked at random, and the whole process is videotaped. The lottery doesn't publish the machine model or ball material for Mega Millions the way Powerball did.

Do the balls behave? In 1,418 Powerball drawings since the game moved to its current 69-ball setup in October 2015, each white ball should have come up about 102.8 times if every number is equally likely. The most frequent, 21, has appeared 127 times and the least frequent, 13, 77 times. The typical ball sits about 10.9 draws from that average. Pure chance would put it near 9.8, and a standard chi-square test finds the gap well within what luck alone produces. The 26 red balls range from 40 to 68 appearances against an expected 54.5. We dug into the hot and cold numbers in the most common Powerball numbers and tested lottery superstitions against 2,315 drawings.

Sources

Powerball: Exciting enhancements coming to POWERBALL draw show

LotteryUSA: How does the Powerball secure its drawings?

Georgia Lottery: Player FAQs