Alabamans Want a New Law 

The residents of Alabama are tired of trying to decide if slot machines are legal in their state or not. As far as they were concerned, all slot machines not in a casino are considered illegal under Alabama state law. But then people started bringing in bingo machines as they said that bingo was legal. The problem with this is that the bingo machines look just like slot machines.  

So Governor Bob Riley went after the new bingo and said that they were slot machines so they were illegal and started cracking down on them. They broke up several slot machine establishments before Attorney General Troy King stuck his nose in it. King, backed by the casinos, said that as bingo was legal, the machines were legal. Riley said that they weren’t because bingo is played on paper – these machines were slot machines. 

So they went to the Alabama Supreme Court who ruled that slot machines were illegal and so were the bingo machines. They are appealing of course, and Riley went right back to closing down the slot machine parlors. Riley said the law had been clearly defined and that was that.  

Except that residents don’t feel that this was the end of it. They want to see a clearer law written that would make the bingo machines and anything similar to a slot machine illegal. They said that if the law is causing that many problems over whether or not the slot machines are in fact, slot machines – then it is time to write a clearer law so that there is no confusion.