A statewide lottery is banned in Nevada’s 159-year-old constitution. The constitution was written when lotteries were seen as corrupt and coincided with a series of national reforms, most famously abolition, that swept the United States in the 1800s.
“This constitutional amendment authorizing a lottery and dedicating the revenue to funding for youth mental health is a common sense solution that will help the many Nevada youth who are battling mental health challenges, just like I did as a child,” Miller said. “Grocery stores, convenience stores, pretty much most bars have slot machines in them as well,” Nichols said. “But those don’t create a lot of jobs, don’t create a lot of economic development. People don’t travel across the country to do that and say, ‘Hey, let’s go to that 7/11 and play.’”
“In Massachusetts, we actually had lottery data at the outlet level, so we knew what every single store in Massachusetts sold as far as lottery tickets,” Nichols said. “We looked at what happened to lottery sales after casinos in Massachusetts opened, and really we did not see any kind of decrease in lottery sales whatsoever.”