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Sports-betting legislation failed to reach the floor of the Georgia House of Representatives before the clock struck midnight on the state’s legislative session, the latest blow to the gaming industry’s expansion hopes in 2024.
A package of sports-betting bills that would have amended the state’s constitution cleared the Senate in February but stalled in the House until the final days of the legislative session that ended on Thursday (March 28).
The bill finally cleared the House Higher Education Committee on Thursday morning after several meetings of discussion where no vote was taken, but the bill was not ultimately voted on in a Rules Committee or on the House floor before the session ended.
The failure to pass sports-betting legislation despite a legitimate effort to do so has become a common refrain in Georgia, with varying attempts since 2019 all meeting the same fate.
Legislators remain divided on whether sports-betting legalization requires a constitutional amendment, so another effort could be made in 2025 to pass standard legislation, which would require a simple majority of the legislature to support it, plus a governor’s signature, rather than a two-thirds majority in both chambers and voter approval.
If that effort should fail, however, as it has in multiple previous attempts, the next opportunity to amend the constitution would be in 2026, meaning sports betting would not launch in the state until at least 2027.
With Georgia’s failure, the hopes for further sports-betting expansion beyond the 38 states plus Washington, D.C. that now offer wagering in the U.S. rest with legislation to add mobile betting in Mississippi, a more comprehensive bill in Alabama and a ballot initiative effort in Missouri.
The Mississippi legislation was approved by the House in February but it has not been addressed in the Senate two months later. Mississippi’s legislative session runs through May 5.
Alabama saw a comprehensive gaming bill that included sports betting being passed by the House but also saw that bill stripped down significantly, including removing sports betting entirely, by the Senate before passage.
If the bill were to go to a conference committee, there is always a possibility that sports betting would find its way back into the picture, but Senate leaders said during the process that the votes were not there in the chamber for sports betting.
In Missouri, an effort backed by a coalition of professional sports teams and sports-betting operators to pursue a ballot initiative continues to compile signatures. After several years of sports-betting bills stalling in the Senate due to efforts to tie sports betting to regulation of skill gaming “grey” machines, the coalition opted to bypass the legislature and pursue a ballot initiative instead.
The effort requires about 180,000 valid signatures to be submitted by May 5, and organizers say they are attempting to secure about 300,000 to protect against signatures being thrown out as invalid.
A spokesman for the campaign, operating under the name Winning for Missouri Education, told Fox 4 in Kansas City, Missouri, that they were nearing the 250,000 mark of collected signatures.
If the efforts are successful, the measure will be on the ballot in November’s election.
