AS SHE BROUGHT down the veto pen – using a relatively light touch to slash $317 million from 60 separate line items – Gov. Maura Healey left intact a long-sought provision that would expand the state Lottery online despite last-minute pushes to restrict its language.
The governor and the House championed the state treasurer’s proposal to allow iGaming run through the Massachusetts Lottery, touting it as a way to bring in more money for childcare grants and let the state compete with the surging online sports gambling market. The provision that ultimately made it through a compromise budget and got gubernatorial sign-off, overcoming Senate ambivalence, is a relatively broad authorization to sell and manage iGaming products through the Lottery.
Based on other states with iLotteries, some of the products would be as straightforward as allowing someone to play Mass Cash or Powerball over their mobile device. Others look like something of a high-tech scratch-ticket. Some approach the appeal of more traditional mobile games – matching patterns, playing battleship – and still others approximate games more often found in casinos than on a lottery ticket.
Players can either pay per game or deposit funds into a lottery account and decide what to put toward what game. Officials say that online games will let the Lottery scale prizes based on the size of bids, which is not not the case with a paper scratch-off.
Lottery officials say the online platform will take about 16 months to fully implement, but they are building out the app and website to be able to immediately accommodate the 350,000 existing lottery players in the state.
Lawmakers estimate the online lottery would bring in $100 million in its first fiscal year, a portion of which would fund a state program providing child care grants. The lineage of tying gaming expansions to youth or education supports harkens back to pushes for legalizing casino gambling under the Deval Patrick administration.
While vocal objection to the iLottery had mostly focused on potential impacts to brick-and-mortar retailers, bringing state-run gaming online also raised some moral concerns from some state leaders.
Attorney General Andrea Campbell, while stopping short of actively advocating against the Lottery’s expansion online, raised red flags early in 2023 that without “safe and responsible app design and game offerings,” the iLottery could mimic some of the more worrying addictive qualities of online sports betting.
The compromise budget includes several safeguards sought by Campbell’s office, including a bar on online lottery play by people under 21 years of age.
While the Lottery is encouraged to advertise the online product, it is meant to do so in a way that does not “jeopardize the public health, welfare, or the safety of the general public” and should not target those under 21 or those who have excluded themselves from gaming outreach through the state problem gambling program. In the same compromise document, the Lottery will have a $6 million advertising budget.
“There are folks, though, that also say that it will increase addiction to the Lottery and increase costs both for the state and for families,” Senate President Karen Spilka said on The Codcast in May, when the chamber left the iLottery out of its budget version. “More families will experience financial issues because of that. So it, again, like anything else, is a balance.”
Under the language of the online lottery authorization approved by Healey, there are signs that the state understands this is treading into potentially risky public health waters, given the surge in concern over online gambling generally. The Lottery will be required to supply anonymized data to the Department of Public Health for gambling addiction research, to help inform harm mitigation strategies, and to develop systems to monitor, detect, and intervene in high-risk gambling.
These age and safety provisions came about during negotiation at the Senate’s insistence, Spilka said on WBUR’s “Radio Boston” after the budget cleared the conference committee where House and Senate negotiators hammered out final details.
As a nod to concerned corner shops and other small retailers who count on in-person lottery sales, the budget provision will “require within any online system a search function to find nearby licensed sales agents offering lottery sales at brick-and-mortar retail stores in the Commonwealth.”
But the last volley in the iLottery exchange as the budget finish line neared came from the other side of in-person gaming – not small retailers but the massive casinos. After the conference committee sent out a budget with an online lottery included, casino interests in Massachusetts, including UNITE HERE Local 26, which represents workers, began lobbying for more restrictive language in the final budget authorization.
More expansive state iLotteries include online slot games and roulette games, which could pose a revenue threat to casinos used to cornering the market on those offerings.
Administration and Finance Secretary Matthew Gorzkowicz wasn’t clear about whether that concern was valid in an interview on Monday. “The games that the Lottery is doing are those games of chance, and they go beyond just scratch tickets,” he said. “There are other forms of games that they’ll be able to do through the iLottery, and that was intentional all along. I think they already have a roulette game now… This is more of those same types of games.”
Gorzkowicz said the language in the final budget was backed by Treasurer Deborah Goldberg, who oversees the Lottery.
CommonWealth Beacon reporter Gintautas Dumcius contributed to this report.