Ohio needs an enforceable law against illegal slot machines

If it looks like a slot machine and acts like a slot machine, is it a slot machine?

Maybe.

Ohio law ought to be able to answer the question posed above pretty easily. But clever operators intent on bringing gambling to storefronts that bill themselves as game rooms or internet cafes have managed to make enforcement of Ohio’s anti-gambling statutes more difficult than it should be.

A loophole in the law designed to allow “games of skill” such as skee-ball, basketball throws and whack-a-mole at carnivals and amusement park midways where success is rewarded with trinkets or stuffed animals is being exploited. Machines that are in effect, if not in fact, illegal slot machines are being passed off as legal games of skill. And increasingly, the law that limits success at such games to prizes of not more than $10 in value are being skirted. Let’s be frank here, the highest skill that most of these machines require is that the player be able to breathe. And if those who are lucky enough to win a prize find that their prize can be effortlessly converted to cash, they’re playing a slot machine.

There are any number of reasons that this should be troublesome in Ohio. Ohio is not Nevada. For decades the state’s voters resisted legalizing casino gambling. Whether that’s the right decision or the wrong one, is not the issue. It was the legal decision. In 2009, Ohio voters broke with past practice and approved the establishment of legal casinos in Cleveland, Toledo, Columbus and Cincinnati. At the same time, there is talk in Columbus once again of legalizing slot machines at the state’s thoroughbred and harness race tracks. If anyone with a rented space and some slot-like machines or an internet hook-up can run a gambling parlor, it makes a mockery of the law.

Protecting the players

Not only that, but there are controls in place for legalized gambling that ensure that the machines are not rigged and that average payouts are as advertised.

Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine is proposing legislation that will place all skill-based machines under the jurisdiction of the Ohio Casino Control Commission that will police and regulate the casinos approved by Ohio voters. The legislation is a sensible approach in that it will require each machine to be certified as a game of skill. Local police departments won’t have to guess whether a particular machine is a legal game of skill or an illegal slot machine. Slot machines will not get a stamp. Those who play the games will know that the machine they are feeding is not rigged against them.

Development value questioned

This newspaper remains unconvinced that casino games and slot machines provide a base on which an area’s economic development can be built. But as far as the four casino sites go, the voters have spoken. The governor and Legislature will be deciding the legality of turning the state’s race tracks into racinos. But we do know that storefront gambling joints that are virtually impossible for local authorities to regulate take more out of a community and its people than they give.

DeWine is on the right track and the General Assembly should respond by passing legislation that redefines Ohio as a state where there’s no mystery as to what’s legal and what isn’t and where some would-be Bugsy Siegal can’t drag a slot machine through a legal loophole.