Winning the lottery is supposed to be a dream come true. But a New Hampshire woman is learning it can be a nightmare.

Last month Jane Doe — not her real name — won a $560 million Powerball jackpot. But the prize is in limbo because, as her pseudonym suggests, she wants to remain anonymous. Her dilemma is that New Hampshire law, like statutes found in most of the country, including Florida, requires her to be publicly identified in order to claim her winnings.

Doe is now in a quandary, and a court battle, to keep her identity secret. It will be tough. She signed the winning ticket, as required by law, before realizing she could have established a trust and have an executor claim the prize for her. State officials maintain she must come forward because having someone else sign the ticket at this point would void it.

Regarding disclosure of winners in Florida, Connie Barnes, spokeswoman for the Florida Lottery, told us in an email that the “Florida Legislature made this a requirement to help ensure the transparency of our games and the claims process.”

That makes sense. No one ever wants to believe the games could be rigged, or that the winners would not get their due proceeds.

Still, it’s hard to see why lottery winners must be outed.

Although studies show most winners continue to work, many of them end up living lives most of us imagine we would, if in their shoes: buying really nice things, traveling the globe, making big financial gifts to family, friends and charity.

But many end up utterly ruined.

For example, longtime Ledger readers may recall the sad case of Abraham Shakespeare.

For those who don’t, in 2006 Shakespeare, an ex-con with a spotty employment record and $6,000 behind in his child support payments, bought two quick-pick Florida Lottery tickets at a Frostproof convenience store. He won $30 million, and took a cash payout of $17 million — and began spending like, as The Ledger once called him, “the Santa Claus of Lakeland.”

In 2008, a woman named Dorice “DeeDee” Moore entered Shakespeare’s life. She befriended him by ostensibly telling him she wanted to write a book about his life. She then helped him move his money around, including into her own accounts. In April 2009, Shakespeare went missing, and his body was recovered nine months later under a concrete slab at a Plant City home owned by Moore. He had been shot to death.

Moore had told investigators that she helped Shakespeare to “disappear” because he was fatigued by people hounding him for money. But investigators soon honed in on her. A jury didn’t buy her denials, and convicted Moore in Shakespeare’s murder in December 2012. She was sentenced to life in prison.

At the time he died, the 43-year-old Shakespeare had blown through all but $1.5 million. At one point, his brother told The Ledger his post-lottery life was all misery. ″‘I’d have been better off broke.’ He said that to me all the time,” said Robert Brown.

It’s a common refrain among lottery winners, who frequently careen into the deep potholes along Easy Street.

In 2016 the New York Daily News reported that nearly 70 percent of jackpot winners, regardless of how much they win, go broke within seven years. Others cash out for good. Driven to depression by profligacy, severely altered lifestyles and perpetual demands for money, some committed suicide. Others, like Shakespeare, have been murdered — by spouses, other family members and total strangers.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, six states — Delaware, Kansas, Maryland, Michigan, North Dakota and Texas — have laws allowing winners to retain their anonymity. Georgia is considering such a law.

We are normally among the fiercest champions of transparency in government and access to public records and meetings, and loathe the government’s attempts to limit that on any scale. But, depending on how narrowly it’s worded, we would likely support such an exemption to Florida’s public records laws to maintain their anonymity, if the Legislature wanted to pursue it.

It’s debatable whether keeping winners' identities hidden would prevent their decent into such calamities. Yet, conversely, given that dismal track record of woe we just related, we should ask if it makes sense to force lottery winners to identify themselves, or what public interest is served by mandating that.