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In the 5 states without lotteries, a case of Powerball fever

5Nov

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Business

In the 5 states without lotteries, a case of Powerball fever

Loretta Williams lives in Alabama but drove to Georgia to buy a lottery ticket for a chance at winning the $1.5 billion Powerball jackpot. She was one of many Alabama ticket-buyers flooding across state lines Thursday. The third-largest lottery prize in U.S. history has people around the country clamoring for a chance to win. But in some of the five states without a lottery, envious bystanders are crossing state lines or sending ticket money across them to friends and family, hoping to get in on the action. "I think it's ridiculous that we have to drive to get a lottery ticket," Williams, 67, said.Five states — Utah, Nevada, Hawaii, Alaska and Alabama — do not have a lottery. A mix of reasons have kept them away, including objections from conservatives, concerns about the impact on...

22 states where online gambling is legal | Entertainment

Sports betting is the most popular—and the most widely legalized—form of online gambling, generating $4.3 billion in gross revenue in 2021, according to the American Gaming Association. Twenty-one of the 22 states featured below have approved it.Among the other forms, six states have legalized online casinos, and online poker is now legal in another set of six states. Online gaming, or iGaming, brought in $3.7 billion last year. Legislators in four states not included on this list—Kansas, Maine, Maryland, and Ohio—have legalized online sports betting in recent months, but their laws have not yet taken effect. A fifth state, Florida, has also passed legislation legalizing online sports betting but has faced additional legal hurdles.Gambling online was ac...

State lotteries transfer wealth out of needy communities, investigation finds

Over the past two decades, state lotteries have nearly doubled in size, driving a multibillion-dollar wealth transfer from low-income U.S. communities to powerful multinational companies.A nationwide investigation of state lotteries by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland found that lottery retailers are disproportionately clustered in lower-income communities in nearly every state. The investigation's analysis of cellphone location data shows that the people who patronize those stores come from the same kinds of communities.Once rare, lotteries now operate in all but five U.S. states. Driven by more than a half-billion dollars in annual ad spending, lottery ticket sales have grown from $47 billion to $82 billion since 2005, according to La F...