Gov. Riley spins the electronic bingo issue

Alabama Gov. Bob Riley’s singleminded opposition to electronic bingo has given him tunnel vision.

He hailed a federal court ruling on electronic bingo in Madison County last week as “definitive,”  warning other communities — like ours — to think twice about setting up electronic bingo operations.
The governor has either misunderstood the ruling or is deliberately misrepresenting it to serve his own purposes.

Riley has determined that electronic bingo is illegal, despite constitutional amendments in 15 counties and the city of Jasper that exempt bingo from the state’s prohibition on lotteries. The governor believes that if a device looks like a slot machine, it’s a slot machine.

Attorney General Troy King disagrees.

“Antifreeze looks like Gatorade, but I’m not going to drink it,” King said.

He has gone to great length to study the machines and has determined that the screen that appears as a slot machine is nothing more than a diversion. The function of the devices is bingo; an image of the player’s bingo card can be shown full-screen or in a corner, and responds to numbers chosen by the game’s central server.

With his attorney general holding a conflicting opinion, Riley tapped former Jefferson County District Attorney David Barber to lead a gambling task force to eradicate electronic bingo.

King, who opposes gambling personally, said he cannot find anything in the law to prohibit the games in question. Still, he characterizes the patchwork of amendments and criteria that vary from one county to another “Alabama’s worst nightmare,” saying the state has no ability to regulate or tax the operations, and no way to know how much money the machines take in.

From a broad perspective, it’s chaos, yet the governor’s office seems intent on using disingenuity to create even more confusion rather than clear up the matter.

In the case at issue, the Department of Texas Veterans of Foreign Wars sued the sheriff of Madison County, Blake Dorning, after the sheriff’s department raided an electronic bingo parlor in Triana, confiscating 200 machines.

U.S. District Judge Lynwood Smith found that the plaintiff had violated the law by failing to adhere to numerous requirements in Amendment 387 to the Alabama Constitution, which authorizes bingo in Madison County.

In the discussion section of his 67-page ruling, Smith’s description of the game’s operation doesn’t contradict King’s. But in his conclusion, he clearly states that he is not ruling on the legality of the devices:

“... Because the court concludes that plaintiff has violated various provisions of Amendment 387, the court need not consider the question of whether the Nova electronic machines constitute ‘bingo’ ...”

In other words, Triana bingo operators ran afoul of the law not because their machines were illegal, but because they didn’t follow constitutional requirements for bingo play in Madison County.

The Alabama Legislature should work to find a way to bring this controversy into focus.

The governor is wrong; this ruling is very clear in its narrow scope, and is not bound to be the last word with regard to electronic bingo — except, perhaps, in Madison County.