By Sondra Washington and Jennifer Davis Rash
Bingo may be considered a big-money game in Alabama today, but it didn’t start out that way. Experts say when legislators began passing constitutional amendment bills allowing the charitable games in 1980, most Alabamians believed they were voting for traditional paper bingo not the so-called electronic bingo being housed in Las Vegas-style casinos that have tried to open across the state.
While state law prohibits the electronic slot-type machines that have been introduced to and pulled from numerous communities at one time or another over the past seven years, the Poarch Band of Creek Indians currently has three casinos in Alabama because federal regulations and laws allow them. (An explanation of how gambling on reservation land functions will be part of this series in an upcoming issue.)
Still VictoryLand in Macon County became the first non-Indian and largest casino in the state when more than 6,000 machines were added to the already-existing facility housing one of Alabama’s four legal dog tracks. It recently shut down its electronic “bingo” operation to avoid being raided. Wind Creek Casino & Hotel, located on the Poarch Creek Indian reservation in Atmore, is currently the largest casino operating in the state with more than 1,600 machines.
But no matter which one has the most machines or the glitziest facility, large-scale bingo operations were never meant for enterprise, said Jefferson County District Attorney Brandon Falls.
“It is supposed to be a way for charities to raise money,” he said. “There were organizations — churches, senior centers, etc. — that were already operating bingo games, and they didn’t want to be in violation of the law. So they went to the Legislature and asked them to pass this narrow exception to the Alabama Constitution’s prohibition on lotteries.
“The gambling interests have taken this narrow exception and tried to drive an armored truck through it by using the names and entities of certain charities and introducing slot machines that they claim are only playing bingo,” Falls said. “However, bingo has nothing to do with the machines they are using and they are in violation of the law because they are establishing for-profit businesses instead of charitable bingo operations.”
Legal bingo operations must be run by a charity, he explained. “They have to do it on their own premises or property that is rented by them. They cannot pay anyone to operate the game on their behalf, and all of the money has to go to the charity. They can’t pay employees and they can’t run it like a business.”
This description doesn’t seem to match any of the current operations garnering endless headlines and generating court cases.
But Dan Ireland, executive director emeritus of Alabama Citizens Action Program, isn’t surprised. He warned legislators when the first bingo amendment was being considered that this would happen. They didn’t listen.
“I argued then that if the gambling interests got their foot in the door, there would be outright gambling, and that’s what we’ve got today,” Ireland said. “It was just a gateway to what we’re facing right now.”
Some state senators and representatives fighting for legislation to legalize the electronic slot-type gambling being labeled electronic bingo admit the gambling interests are using the constitutional amendments permitting bingo in certain areas to expand gambling in the state.
And operations managers at some of the casino-style facilities that were open earlier this year told The Alabama Baptist that the tiny digital bingo card tucked in the corner of the machine’s screen is only there “because we have to have that to be legal.”
They said the spinning symbols are what matters. “The bingo card is just there because we have to have that in Alabama.”
But outgoing Attorney General Troy King contends the machines really are playing bingo — at least in some areas of the state.
“The game is playing bingo, but the look of the slot machine is just a façade,” he said, noting people want slots, so it is just to give them what they want.
King — who researched the machines at VictoryLand, Greenetrack in Greene County and the three facilities run by the Poarch Creeks in 2004 — found the machines in those five operations legal under Alabama law.
“(These) are machines with bells and whistles but with a bingo card in the corner,” he said. “When you put money in the machine, bingo balls start falling.”
Experts who work for slot machine manufacturing companies disagreed. During several electronic “bingo” court cases in the state, they said electronic bingo does exist but not in the form found in Alabama.
Electronic bingo is still the game of bingo in how it looks and is played; it is just on a computer monitor rather than paper, the experts said. The machines in Alabama are slot machines with a small bingo card icon added through the software, they noted.
But as long as the machines cannot be converted into true slot machines, then they are legal, King explained. The hard part is knowing which ones are adaptable and which ones aren’t, he said. “There are machines that are legal and some that are illegal.”
And while King has maintained his stance on the legality of electronic “bingo” in Alabama, questions still remain over what bingo, in an ever-changing world of technology, looks like and whether Alabamians have forgotten the real reason bingo was legalized in some areas in the first place.
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