(Radio Iowa) – It’s going to be a throwback Thursday (today) for the Iowa Lottery at the Iowa State Fair. C-E-O Matt Strawn says they will commemorate the sale of first lottery ticket at the Fair 40 years ago.  “So we’re going to attempt to set a Guinness World Record for the most people simultaneously scratching a lottery ticket,” he says. Strawn says they will try to go well beyond the record. “The current record was set in Poland in 2023 with 550 participants. Of course, at the Iowa Lottery, you know we don’t do anything small, so we’re going to aim for close to two-thousand participants out here at the fairgrounds,” Strawn says.
Each participant will get a free “Scratch, Match & Win” ticket that has a maximum prize of 50 thousand dollars.

“That’s the one that everyone will scratch simultaneously. We’ve got a commemorative gold coin that is going to be used for scratching,” he says. “And then during the course of the event, we have three separate drawings, two drawings for four-thousand dollar cash prize. And then we thought on the 40th anniversary it would be fun to have a 40-thousand dollar cash prize.” The big prize winner will be drawn after the record attempt. Strawn says the Iowa Lottery has come a long way from that very first scratch ticket that cost one dollar. “And that was a ticket that if you bought it at a grocery store convenience store, you could only redeem it at that grocery store at that convenience store where you purchased it,” Strawn says. “So you think about the tremendous evolution of all the lottery’s products, right? There wasn’t a Powerball back then. There wasn’t a Mega Millions. There wasn’t additional scratch tickets.”

Strawn says you can take part in the record attempt, but you need to get there early. “Any Iowan that wants to be a part of this Guinness World Record attempt, I would encourage them to line up no later than 4 o’clock. So the gates are going to open at 4.30 in the Elwell Family Park, which is in the northwest corner of the fairgrounds. And we do have limited capacity,” Strawn says. Scratch tickets have consistently remains the Iowa Lottery’s top selling product throughout the 40 years.

Strawn says the Lottery has raised two-point-five( $2.5) billion dollars for state programs in those four decades.