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Missouri voters will have the opportunity to legalize sports betting this November after state officials approved a petition Tuesday (August 13) to put the issue to a ballot initiative.
Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft announced that his office found more than the required total of 183,000 vote signatures to be valid and issued a certificate of sufficiency to Amendment 2, a measure that would permit online sports betting, as well as land-based sports wagering on riverboat casinos and in or around professional sports facilities within Missouri.
The measure has been backed by a coalition of FanDuel and DraftKings, as well as Missouri-based professional sports teams that founded the political action committee Winning for Missouri Education to pursue the measure after several years of failed attempts to pass a bill through the state legislature.
“Missouri is now just one step away from joining most other states in legalizing sports betting and being able to provide millions of dollars to Missouri classrooms,” said Bill DeWitt III, president of Major League Baseball's St. Louis Cardinals, in a statement. “On behalf of all six of Missouri’s professional sports teams, I would like to thank everyone who signed a petition to get this on the ballot.”
State law requires valid signatures from at least 5 percent of legal voters in any six of Missouri’s eight congressional districts to be eligible for the ballot.
The measure, if enacted by a majority of voters, will permit licensed riverboat casinos and professional sports teams from six professional sports leagues to obtain retail licenses and a mobile betting license that would allow them to partner with a designated operator partner.
Additionally, the measure allows the Missouri Gaming Commission to issue up to two untethered mobile sports-betting licenses.
In total, more than 20 market-access opportunities would be available under the proposal, under terms that would be considered by most to be favorable to the gaming industry, which is unsurprising given the $7m that FanDuel and DraftKings spent to back the plan, according to campaign finance reports.
Operators would pay a 10 percent tax on adjusted gross revenue, which includes deductions for promotional play up to 25 percent of the operator's total cash received for a month and federal excise tax. License fees would also be favorable, with a $250,000 cost for a five-year retail license and a $500,000 cost for a five-year mobile license.
If the measure is enacted, wagering would start no later than December 2025, with no category of license being granted an earlier start date than another.
Voters will take up the measure during the state-wide general election on November 5.
If enacted, Missouri would become the first state to legalize mobile sports betting in the United States through a ballot initiative campaign rather than an act of a state legislature to amend the constitution.
