Everyone always seems jaded when it comes to this specific topic, so I'll give my two cents since I'm of the few with a contrary view on it.

The lottery isn't rigged in the way most seem to think. I know two lottery winners IRL. One of them won a moderately large jackpot (and still managed to blow it all on stupid crap) and the other won one of those "win X amount every day/week for the rest of your life" lotteries. He's done a little better, but that's because he basically just retired at 30 since he had a steady income for the rest of his life.

So I know for a fact THERE ARE legitimate lottery winners. I firmly believe most of these large jackpots are actually won by random people, who will more likely than not blow it all and end up bankrupt in a year or two, if that. Because they don't know how to handle money responsibly.

But that's a different topic. The "rigging" isn't the actual jackpot. It's all the "unclaimed" smaller prizes.Did you know that on average, there's something like $150-250 BILLION in unclaimed smaller prizes ($10K-$5 Million)? Supposedly, that all goes to the public school system of whatever state the unclaimed ticket was bought it, but we all know it never does. It get's laundered out to various slush funds for the cabal.

Most people don't understand how the lottery works. Every time a drawing is made, the proceeds from the ticket sales have to be split between payouts for smaller prizes, paying employees, and increasing the jackpot size if it wasn't won.

This is where I believe the actual rigging is coming in to play. The higher the jackpot, the more people will play. The more people that play, the more "unclaimed tickets" can be printed (probably in a similar manner to how election ballots are fraudulently printed into existence). Which means more money can be funneled away from the jackpot increases.

So for example, between saturday and monday, the $1 Billion+ jackpot increased by roughly $200 Million. When numbers get that large, it's entirely likely they probably had roughly $800 Million-$1 Billion in small prize payouts. Assume 30% of that was siphoned into slush funds. That's $300 Million they made in a single night that's virtually untraceable since no one cares about the millions of $10K winning tickets floating around.

If that happens 3 more times (And keep in mind the numbers will progressively increase), then they'll make more money than the jackpot will be worth. And that's not including all the money they've siphoned leading up to the $1 Billion mark.

So yes, the lottery is probably rigged. But not for the jackpot winner. They're preventing anyone from winning for long periods of time, in order to siphon off massive amounts from the smaller prizes (far more than any single jackpot will provide), and once they deem it to be to obvious, they'll finally let some random schmuck win it so that too much attention isn't drawn to it.

As for why we've had so many $1 Billion+ Jackpots lately, well it should be obvious. They're running out of funds, so they're desperate and pushing the envelope with this specific method out of desperation. If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say this one will probably be won around the $2.5-$3 Billion mark since each jackpot has been getting progressively higher when it was won.