Some news stories are strange enough to stop you mid-scroll, and Maine’s latest moose permit drawing produced exactly that kind of double-take. Among the names pulled in the state’s yearly lottery was a former NASCAR champion who, by every available account, had already passed away before the results were posted.
The winning entry belonged to Kyle Busch of Denver, North Carolina — a name that needs no introduction for anyone who has followed stock car racing over the past two decades. Busch spent his career stacking wins and titles across NASCAR’s premier divisions, building one of the most decorated résumés the sport has ever seen.
The complication, of course, is that Busch had reportedly died several weeks before his name surfaced on the winners’ list.
State records indicate the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife ran its usual drawing, pulling a small pool of winners from thousands of hopeful applicants competing for a limited number of moose permits. Busch’s entry was sitting in that pool, and the system treated it like any other.
What happened here looks less like a glitch and more like a paperwork gap. Maine reportedly doesn’t automatically check its applicant pool against death records filed in other states, so an entry submitted before someone’s passing can stay live and get drawn months later. That’s apparently exactly what unfolded.
The permit itself won’t be wasted. Officials are expected to reallocate it through their standard backup process, the same way they would handle any winner who couldn’t claim a tag. Even so, the oddity of the announcement spread quickly once people noticed whose name was on the list.
For fans who watched Busch race, there’s something almost poetic about it. He spent years rolling into tracks far from home and beating the locals on their own turf, whether he was running a national-series event or dropping in on a short track somewhere off the beaten path. He had a habit of leaving with hardware nobody expected him to take.
Seen through that lens, a posthumous lottery win feels weirdly on-brand. One more time, his name landed in a winner’s column where few would have predicted it.
The episode also underlines a broader headache for government agencies: keeping sprawling, multi-state databases current is genuinely hard. Lottery software is built to crunch entries fast and fairly, but it isn’t always wired to know when something has changed in a person’s life in another part of the country.
Nobody expects a moose-permit drawing to make national headlines. For a brief stretch, though, one of racing’s most familiar names was back in the conversation — and somehow, improbably, winning yet again.
Related reading: