Texas Lottery survives legislative session, but changes are here | Texas: The Issue Is

Texas Lottery survives, but changes are ahead

Texas lawmakers did not eliminate the state lottery, but several changes will be made to how the games are played in Texas and the people who run them.

AUSTIN, Texas - It is game over for the Texas Lottery Commission.

The Texas Lottery Commission had allowed lottery tickets to be purchased online and the use of courier services to buy them in bulk. Those policies are now out, but, at the urging of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick the lottery was allowed to continue under the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation.

Senate Bill 3070 was a late addition to the legislative session before it ended earlier this month. The bill was filed by Edgewood Republican Bob Hall in response to a controversy involving questionable lottery payouts.

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Now the bill is awaiting approval from Gov. Greg Abbott.

Sen. Bob Hall on Texas Lottery changes

What they're saying:

FOX 7 Austin's Rudy Koski talked to Senator Hall about the political gamble and how the issue is not yet over.

Sen. Bob Hall

Hall: "Once you accept the fact that we're not going to shut them down, I think we're doing the next best thing in the way it's being reorganized. We have restructured that clearly prohibits them from having the courier operations, moving to using a telephone. We're going to go back to a paper slip interface so that you cannot have the high-speed buying, which enabled the theft that took place. We don't actually know how many times it actually happened now that it was covered up so well. So by restructuring it, limiting it to a maximum of 100 tickets, maximum of a hundred dollar ticket in there and having to buy it in a brick and mortar facility, we've gone back to the original legislation that basically said adults only, so you know you're dealing with an adult and your interface for the lottery ticket is going to be the paper slip not an iPhone, not an iPad and sold in brick and mortar locations that otherwise do other business, not the warehouses."

Koski: "By moving it to the new agency, it still comes up for review in two years. Has this lottery game been set up to fail?"

Hall: "I don't think it's been set up to fail. I think what we'll see is, is it the proper thing to be doing? I mean, there are a lot of people that tell you gambling is not a core function of government, tunning a gambling operation. And running a gambling operations that we had, in which we had a criminal organization embedded in our government. This wasn't smart people from the outside figuring out how to beat the system. They may have worked with some smart people that told them what to do, so collectively. None of this could have happened in the [Colleyville April 2023 lottery win], except for the fact that it was set up completely from within the Lottery Commission itself."

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Koski: "You made accusations that something criminal was going on. There are investigations that are happening. But are you worried that these investigations will just go away now that the issue in regards to moving the agency has been done?"

Hall: "No, the investigation of what went on is ongoing, and I do expect that something will come out of that in the end. It may be that the trail is cold enough that they have a hard time actually getting the evidence they need to pursue, but the main thing is the investigation, I think, has shut down that part of it. And moving back to just buying the $1 tickets or the $5 tickets will make a big difference. What they were doing was bulk buying, where they were using a QR code that was developed by an outfit called Spinola in Malta gaming the game. They could buy 25.8 million tickets in 72 hours and my concern is that happened, a lot of people saw it happened, knew it was happening and didn't say a word about it."

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