At present the United State DV lottery (DV stands for Diversity Visa), also known as the “green card lottery” is done online. The next DV or diversity visa lottery, (also known as the “green card lottery”) is open to application in the late fall each year. Here is the link to the information about this application on the US State Department’s website. The State Department processes the applications and issues the visas unlike most immigration benefits which start with petitions with the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, formerly the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) which was part of the Justice Department.  There is also information about the Diversity Visa program on the USCIS website. The DV program was started to make sure that countries where the applicant base for immigrant visas was below established quotas would have the opportunity to increase immigration from these countries.

You can complete the initial form for the DV program on the internet with digital photos, the photos must be according to specification and the proper size. The form can only be completed during the application period. The next DV lottery period will most likely be in November 2009 for the DV2011 visas. Now that this program is online you can also check the status of your application, you need not worry about delay due to local mail problems, failure of delivery which was a common problem previous to the online tracking system being put into place.

Please note that third party services cannot help you file the visa application, you must do it yourself from a computer that can access the internet (which appear to have). You can read about this here.  Do not pay an online service to complete the application for you, generally speaking these are scams, you can complete the application yourself, as long as you have access to a computer that has a connection to the internet.