Here's what I've been able to gather about lotteries.
Cheating in lotteries has been long established over time. In the early days, we use to see balls colliding in a chamber with a few coming out of the gate. We don't see that anymore, or at least I haven't.
It's because those that are involved in the lottery found out they can cheat with friends by injecting water into a few of the balls to gain an advantage. It came to ahead on live television when one of the balls burst with water. I don't remember which state lottery that was.
So lottery boards switched to computer generated numbers. Some found ways to cheat that by altering code. They can do this since computers are not random, and if those were, computers would not work. Unless, of course, you think of the old days of MS Windows with blue screens. Those seem very much random to me, lol.
How this works is the computer is programmed with a random number generator. It's actually anything but random. The random-ness comes with with the seed number. If one uses the same seed number, they get the same output everything. So the seed number needs to be completely random. Most lottery boards that I can get details on measure radioactivity of a certain element that's in the air. They'll pick an element that has variable radioactivity to generate the seed number.
But even this can be exploited by unscrupulous people. There's an infamous rigged multi-state lottery where the lottery board "security officer" interjected code into the algorithm that used a pre-programmed seed number on two days out of the year. So if the lottery was drawn on either of those two days, they knew the numbers that would win.
Moving to the NHL lottery, it seems they took this into account and actually hold two lotteries based each on the ball and computer method. Up first is the computer where a 1,000 entries are created and randomly assigned to lottery teams. The amount each team gets is based on their lottery percentage.
Then the second stage lottery where balls are used. I couldn't find whether these two stages are held on the same day, or different days. If different days, how far apart are those held either.
The ball lottery uses 14 multiple numbered balls for a total of 1,001 combinations. So when the first of the lottery numbers come out, they cross-reference the computer generated list to see which team was randomly assigned that number. Same thing is done for the second draw.
So if someone that's involved with the accounting firm, or NHL, that wants to give their favorite team better odds, they would need to rig both lotteries. Or would they? Not necessarily.
The law of averages is going to see that all 1,000 numbers are used near equally over time. One could decide to rig the program so their favorite team is assigned numbers that are the most under-represented in the ball drawing.
This would not be as effective has rigging both lottery methods, computer and balls. That would be much harder as I'm sure the NHL restricts access to both so that the same people do not manage both. Or we hope so.
Notice I said there are 1,001 number combinations on the ball lottery but 1,000 combinations on the computer lottery? The NHL has said they throw out one of the numbers, but does that skew the randomness? There's also a rumor I've found that the commission can choose to assign that to a team of their choice. Sort like the house's favoritism in the green numbers on the roulette wheel.
The other question that has no answers that I can find is what happens when a team is ineligible for the lottery due to winning it twice in the last five years. How do they account for that without skewing the odds. Do they remove that team from the computer generated list. Do they assign it the lowest odds in hopes that it does not win the draw.
Do they re-adjust the lottery system for a smaller computer generated list and smaller combinations on the ball lottery? That would be a major hassle.
The NHL doesn't answer my questions. I'm sure if they did they would basically say that secrecy is a component of securing the lottery. It's harder to rig a lottery if one doesn't have a complete understand on the details.
Lucky me, I aged out of drinking a few years ago. It's been good for my health and great for my wallet.
