An ex-convict named Abraham Shakespeare thought he had hit the big time in 2006. He won $30 million in the Quick-Pick, one of Florida’s state lottery games. Women flocked to him, including one named Dee Dee Moore, who had a genius for embezzlement. By 2008, Shakespeare was a missing person. Police found his body under a slab of concrete at Dee-Dee’s house in Plant City. By that time, she had run through almost all of his winnings.
It is, notwithstanding the picturesque names and details, a true story. New Hampshire lawyer Steven Gordon shared it in a complaint he brought before a southern New Hampshire court in the last days of January. Gordon’s client is a woman who three weeks earlier had walked into Reed’s Ferry Market in the village of Merrimack and bought the winning ticket for one of the biggest jackpots in the history of American gambling—a $559 million payoff in the 44-state Powerball lottery.
Winning the Powerball is a 1-in-292,000,000 shot. Jane Doe, as the court documents call her, can hardly be blamed for failing to consider the difficulties that might arise from having half a billion dollars. But they are occurring to her now. One involves being preyed upon by con artists, the way Abraham Shakespeare was. But more poignantly, according to her court complaint, she wants to retain “the freedom to walk into a grocery store or attend public events without being known or targeted as the winner of a half-billion dollars.”
In theory, she has that freedom. New Hampshire has a citizens’ right-to-know law that makes anything involved with government an open book, and lottery winners are subject to a once-over from the state’s child-support agency, to make sure money is not being pocketed by a deadbeat dad. But there is a way around these things. The winner can establish a trust and collect his winnings in its name. That is what a New Hampshire resident did who won a $487 million payout from Powerball two years ago.
But this year’s winner made what she now considers “a huge mistake.” As soon as she discovered that her ticket matched the numbers read out on television, she filled out her name and address on the ticket. She now wants to white out that information and replace it with the name of a trust—but that might constitute a defacement of the ticket and invalidate it. The right to make this alteration is what she is petitioning for. And since a winning lottery ticket has replaced the work-based outcomes that used to constitute the American dream, most observers from coast to coast are rooting for her.
But there is a problem. It is the government that is paying out the money, and the integrity of the government’s operations demand a certain transparency. In 1963, when New Hampshire’s legislators created the first state lottery (or “sweepstakes,” as they called it), they did not do so as a way of providing fun. They set it up to raise revenue.
A constitutionalist will find this one of the saddest stories of the 20th century. State governments’ legitimacy has dwindled to the point that they must now use prizes to “trick” the public into parting with the money to support their states. Because well-educated people are less liable to be taken in by tricks (at least of the traditional kind), and because education is correlated with wealth, the system preys on the ignorant and the economically insecure. Lotteries don’t just undermine republican virtue, they sow inequality.
But that is not the question before the court. The question is the legal one of whether this woman has a right to anonymity. And the hardheaded answer is that she probably does not. A lottery is a system of taxing and spending. We know from the Supreme Court’s big 2012 Obamacare case, NFIB v. Sebelius, that taxes can take many forms. A lottery system is less like a tax than Obamacare, in the sense that buying a lottery ticket is voluntary. But it is more like a tax than Obamacare in the sense that it is a payment of money to government out of which the government then funds its activities. This is where the ambiguity in the New Hampshire case arises.
There are two sides to budgeting.
- Those who pay into the government till are taxpayers. They are entitled to privacy about their business doings.
- Those who accept money from the government are either welfare recipients or contractors. They have some rights to privacy, too, but those rights are overridden by the right of citizens to know what their government is doing and whom it is favoring. There are exceptions for national-security contractors, but even these are controversial.
The New Hampshire winner is, like most of us, playing both roles. In buying her Powerball ticket, she entered into a relationship analogizable to paying taxes. In collecting the money, she will be doing something analogizable to government contracting. That New Hampshire collects and pays out only a small share of the national Powerball take does not change the principle here.
And the court simply should not allow a legal channel to be opened up through which such large government payments can be made to anonymous parties.
Consider this very case. Steven Gordon, the lawyer representing the lottery winner, is the law partner and longtime political compadre of Bill Shaheen, the husband of New Hampshire senator Jeanne Shaheen. The firm they founded together, Shaheen & Gordon, is to Concord what the Rose Law Firm was to Little Rock—an intersection of politics and business under perpetual surveillance by its political foes. During Jeanne Shaheen’s 2014 reelection campaign against Scott Brown, her office had to answer questions about whether her husband was a participant in the “Economic Stimulus Opportunity Team” that Gordon and others at the firm had set up to steer part of the trillion-dollar Obama administration stimulus to New Hampshire firms. He was not.
But it undermines public confidence to have the best-connected lawyers in a state arguing that people be paid out vast sums of state money in an untraceable way. Funneling the payment through a trust does nothing to change that. The hundreds of millions of dollars that Gordon’s client has just won is what state lottery commissioner Charlie McIntyre once, in a boastful mood, called “life-altering money.” The lady has decided she does not want her life altered. God bless her. The problem is not that her wish is unreasonable—it is that it would give the government a dangerous power to defraud.
