While everyone has been watching the numbers for online gambling in Nevada, New Jersey and Delaware, online lottery sales have been quietly increasing.
Online gambling numbers in those three states have been underwhelming and have also spurred a much-talked-about effort by billionaire Sheldon Adelson to secure federal legislation to ban online gambling.
That proposed ban, however, would exempt online lotteries, which have been spreading. Bluff Magazine recently outlined that growth and speculated that it will be the lotteries—not poker and slots—that eventually lead to a U.S. strategy on online gambling.
Three states—Minnesota, Illinois, and Georgia—have recently began online lotteries and three more—Kentucky, Maryland, and Michigan—have approved online lottery sales. Maryland and Michigan are expected to have their online lottery website up in the next few months
Meanwhile, no states added online casino and poker in 2014.
The U.S. Department of Justice’s re-interpretation of the 1961 Wire Act—which opened the door for intra-state online gambling—came after New York and Illinois requested clarification regarding the Wire Act’s application to online lotteries.
New York has yet to enact online lottery sales, but could move quickly.
Kentucky has officially selected GTECH as their online lottery platform. The Kentucky Lottery expects to have the state’s iLottery up and running by fall of 2015 according to published reports.
Meanwhile, West Virginia’s Lottery Director John Musgrave has said that his state is also considering online lottery sales. Florida is also considering legislation for online lottery sales.
That creates the possibility that more than a dozen states will have online lottery sales in place by the end of 2015.
Bluff speculates that such sales could serve as a type of intermediary online gambling system, which requires the same verification and geolocation systems used by online casinos. Opponents of online gambling would have difficulty saying online casino games don’t have sufficient safeguards while the lottery systems use those same programs.
The magazine concludes “The success—regulatory speaking—of online lotteries can also disprove many of the fears being raised regarding online gambling. If online lotteries can be shown to be safe, secure, and well regulated, it destroys these same arguments against poker or online casino games, which would have to abide by the same regulations, and have also proven to be safe, secure and well regulated in Nevada, New Jersey, and Delaware.
“If online lotteries succeed, it makes the path towards legal online poker easier, and makes a potential ban at the federal level that much more difficult,” the magazine said.
