By Sam Douglass
Two separate bills that together ban the state lottery and impose criminal penalties on offering sports betting were presented to lawmakers on Tuesday.
While the legislature is long past the crossover deadline for new bills, committees often begin having new conversations. Two such bills were given their first committee time on Tuesday in the House Government Operations committee. H.133 and H.913, introduced by Rep. Tom Stevens (D-Washington Chittenden), seeks to end the state lottery, ban sports betting, and regulate prediction markets.
Established in 1977, following a public referendum that garnered 66% of the vote, the Vermont State Lottery has been a reliable source of state revenue. According to Stevens, the state generates roughly $30 million from lottery ticket sales, which he acknowledges would create a shell game to backfill the lost revenue if his bills were to pass. However, there is more gambling in Vermont than the lottery.
Sports betting, like DraftKings or FanDuel, was introduced recently to Vermont under Act 63 in 2023. It became a regulated industry under the Department of Liquor and Lottery with contracts awarded to three companies to operate in Vermont in its first year.
These mobile apps have become popular nationally, including in Vermont, for users to make live bets on games. According to Stevens, Vermonters spent a collective $160 million on sports betting in 2025 and the state collected only $7.2 million in tax revenue.
During the presentation of his bills, Stevens spoke at length about the negative effects of gambling, especially its addictive capacity, drawing comparisons to alcohol consumption. The recent move to sports betting apps has made the problem worse, he said, by removing barriers that used to exist between the individual and the game.
“Gambling is a rush. Apparently, most people seem to be okay with it, or they can handle it, or they claim to handle it. But for the percentage of people that are affected by it, it destroys families. It bankrupts people, and that’s what we make [tax revenue] when we allow gambling.”
Despite its negative impacts, Stevens acknowledges that it’s unlikely that sports betting will ever be banned or further regulated, but his second bill seeks to regulate another similar market: prediction betting.
“Let’s just know that sports betting is here and it’s unlikely to go away,” said Stevens, “And so budgets are being made on guessing or predicting how much money we’re going to make from sports. That’s now just like cigarettes or lottery tickets or alcohol. We’re going to make estimates, and we’re going to know what our income is no matter how Tom feels about it.”
Prediction market apps, like Polymarket or Kalshi, have been widely advertised and adopted by many Americans. They allow users to place bets on different events, from natural disasters to the length of press conferences in the White House, or whether the federal government will make certain policy decisions. Stevens explained that this industry is moving faster than regulators can keep up and described it as the “wild west” with users being able to set up bets for basically anything.
This leaves prediction markets vulnerable to trading with insider information, Stevens said. Concerns of insider trading, especially regarding U.S. military action, have caused some of the app developers to implement safeguards and tighten rules on who can make trades and about what topics. However, Stevens is concerned that regulations won’t go far enough.
While his bills, H.133 and H.913 aim to regulate what is currently considered gambling, Stevens said that these apps and the prediction market industry as a whole are shifting towards being considered as commodity trading, similar to trading futures contracts. However, his bill is prepared for this. When banning them, the language of H.913 expands the definition of gambling to include prediction market securities or commodities.
“The problem with predictive markets, because regulatory things are theoretically in place, but enforcement is not, is that you have, the real possibilities of creating a system that is going to take from and it’s going to say all of the work that we did on gambling is going to go away because this won’t be considered gambling. This will be considered commodity trading if everything works out in the next five years,” said Stevens.
Information for In Committee news reports are sourced from GoldenDomeVt.com and the General Assembly website. Generative AI has not been used in the writing of this story.