In this small town, with a population of three hundred, give or take, it was tradition to hold a lottery in June. The heads of all the families in the town pick slips of paper from a traditional black box, and if their slip was blank, then they were safe. However if a person pulled out a slip with a black dot on it, the townspeople would throw rocks at them until they were no longer amongst the living.
The writer also alluded to other towns participating in this ritual as well.
It used to be more of a ceremony, where there was an initiation of the "name-caller," and there was a chant that went along with the ritual as well. It seems as though those traditional elements were dropped over the years, which leads me to believe that the tradition was no longer for religious or cultural purposes, but for mere entertainment of the townsfolk.
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