Forty-seven to one - Monday night's margin in the state Senate on a vote banning "sweepstakes" parlors - amounts to long odds against continuation of this barely legal offshoot of the banned video poker business. But the House has yet to act, and unless and until it does there's always a chance the parlors will survive.
That would be a serious mistake. To avoid making it, House members should reflect on a bit of their own chamber's history.
It was video poker, after all, that touched off the Jim Black scandals a few years ago. The Democratic House speaker served for years as the industry's principal protector in the General Assembly (while extracting more than $200,000 in contributions from video poker interests).
Then, allegations of lower-level corruption centering on the video poker industry caused the U.S. attorney's office to look in Black's direction. His speakership finally sank like a stone under the weight of state and federal probes involving video gambling, the lottery, bribery and improper campaign contributions. Black wound up in federal prison.
Not long before his fall, the legislature finally banned video poker, with an unavoidable exception for the Cherokees' mountain resort. The state Court of Appeals has since upheld the ban.
Those cozy parlors
Now, however, privately operated for-profit electronic gambling is back, in cities and towns across North Carolina, via the storefront sweepstakes dodge. The fast-proliferating parlors sell certain services - Internet access, telephone time - but the main lure for customers involves a potential payout from electronic games. Parlor operators insist this setup isn't gambling. Instead, they say, it resembles fast-food outlets' customer giveaways.
This is a distinction without any significant difference. As argued on this page Sunday, the sweepstakes parlors and video poker are near-enough kissing cousins. Both amount to commercial gambling in a state that traditionally has not gone that route. It's one reason we're not Nevada. Our cave-in to pressure to establish a state-run lottery should not become an excuse to open the door to private operators.
Another link to the video poker-era scandals becomes evident when you look at some of the key players in the sweepstakes business. Bob Hall of Democracy North Carolina, who has productively followed political contributions - and political shenanigans - for many years, recently noted some pertinent connections.
Birds of a feather
Hall cites eight men formerly associated with the video poker industry who have made campaign contributions to legislative defenders of the sweepstakes parlors, such as Democratic Rep. Earl Jones of Greensboro. Also, Hall says, a number of lobbyists working on behalf of sweepstakes interests formerly worked for "the old Amusement Machine Association or various video operators during the last round of battle."
And no wonder. In both video poker and its sweepstakes offshoots, the name of the game is to separate the customer from his money while making him eager to come back for more (or less). Industry defenders ask what's wrong with that - don't we all blow a few bucks foolishly at one time or another?
Surely we do, but this kind of gambling is different. On Monday night, echoes of decades-old arguments could be heard on the Senate floor - how gambling's ill-effects harm individual families and the wider society. It's not necessary to sign on fully to a paternalistic view - Raleigh knows best - to see the force of that argument. And North Carolina has never been an anything-goes kind of place.
An industry with a proven record of corruption. The legacy of Jim Black. The ill-effects of serious gambling. They add up to a clear call: The House, like the Senate, should extend the video poker ban to sweep in the sweepstakes parlors.
