If lawmakers pass a plan backed by State Treasurer Deborah Goldberg, the Massachusetts State Lottery could be coming to phones and computers across the state.
After falling short in the last legislative session, proponents of expanding the state lottery into the digital world are renewing their push.
“I had to come around to this thinking because I myself hadn’t thought about online lottery games, but I saw the way millennials are operating is really online,” Goldberg said. “This past Christmas shopping season, Cyber Monday outperformed Black Friday. We really want to be prepared to have a more modern, forward-thinking product.”
Goldberg introduced a bill last session to authorize the Lottery Commission to explore offering online games, and recently re-filed it in the new session. State Sen. Jennifer Flanagan, D-Leominster, has filed a similar bill that would allow online lottery games.
Being able to play the Lottery over a phone or computer, Goldberg said, would be a way to “modernize” an aging system, Goldberg said.
The push comes at a time when scratch ticket sales, the lottery’s biggest moneymaker, are slumping. Through the first five months of fiscal 2017, scratch ticket sales were down 3 percent compared to the same span in the previous year.
Goldberg’s office has projected the lottery will return $965 million in funding to municipal governments this year in the form of unrestricted aid, down from $986.9 million last fiscal year.
Flanagan said lottery revenue is an important source of funding for cities and towns.
“In 2009 when lottery sales weren’t as good as they are now, we heard from cities and towns asking, ‘What about the lottery money?'” Flanagan said.
Goldberg said it’s too early to predict startup costs for an online lottery system or potential revenues.
“This is in a very preliminary stage,” she said. “It’s a request for authorization to even be able to look at what could potentially be an online lottery program,” she said.
She said it’s also too soon to speculate about what online lottery games could potentially look like, whether they would be online versions of existing games or entirely new products.
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