{"id":67,"date":"2014-10-08T19:06:38","date_gmt":"2014-10-08T19:06:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/britsimonsays.com\/?p=67"},"modified":"2019-07-12T19:51:30","modified_gmt":"2019-07-12T19:51:30","slug":"the-lottery-draw-process-holes-theory-and-so-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/britsimonsays.com\/the-lottery-draw-process-holes-theory-and-so-on\/","title":{"rendered":"The lottery draw process, “holes theory” and so on…."},"content":{"rendered":"
People are often confused about how the case numbers are assigned and where they are in \u201cthe list\u201d to get one of the elusive 50,000 Green Cards. To answer that properly it is worth explaining the lottery process itself.<\/p>\n
There is an entry period of around one month, typically in October of each year. During that time people from all over the world will enter as there is no cost to entering the lottery and it is a pretty simple process.<\/p>\n
Between the end of the entry period and the announcement in the following May, the \u201cwinners\u201d and (selectees) are chosen. The process is like this.<\/p>\n
Entries are sorted into their respective regions, Africa, Europe, Asia, South America and Oceania. The rules say that there should be an equal chance of winning within each region. There is a target of the number of selectees that will be chosen. The actual chance at this point is affected therefore by the number of entries a given region receives, compare to the number of selectees that will be picked for the first stage.<\/p>\n
So \u2013 let\u2019s look at\u00a0some examples.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s say that Africa receives 5 million entries (each entry can be for a single person or can include derivatives). It might be decided to pick 100,000 entries for the initial stage. That would mean a 2% chance of getting to that stage (100,000\/5,000,000*100). Another region might have a higher percentage chance of winning per entry but get far fewer entries.<\/p>\n
This is probably best explained by looking at some real data from 2013. The reason to use 2013 data is because that is the latest year that we currently have complete data \u2013 both entries and selectees.<\/p>\n
So \u2013 first of all take a look at how many entries each country in the OC region had. I used official entry data<\/a> and official selectee data<\/a>.<\/p>\n