Nearly 500 convenience store owners across Virginia staged a protest April 15 in which they simultaneously stopped selling Virginia Lottery tickets in protest of Governor Glenn Youngkin’s amendments to a bill passed by the legislature to legalize and regulate so-called skill games.
The legislature had sent a bill to the governor’s desk that contained few restrictions on how and where the slot-like games would be allowed.
Instead of signing or vetoing the legislation, Youngkin exercised his option under the law to send the bill back to the legislature with amendments. Should the legislature fail to vote for the amended bill, it would kill it for the year.
The restrictions objected to by the convenience store owners, led by the Virginia Merchants and Amusement Coalition, would give local governments or voters to ban the skill machines, would create stricter regulations to prevent underage gambling, and would raise the tax on skill game revenues to 35 percent.
The store owners complain that this would render the games economically unviable in many areas, providing local voters permitted them.
After a ban on the skill machines was approved and enacted last fall, forcing skill-game operators to shut the machines down, merchants who had depended on revenues from the games launched the effort that resulted in bills this year in both chambers of the legislature to legalize and regulate the machines. Youngkin had stated publicly that he had problems with both bills.
