The Skill Games Lobby Came for My Home District's State Senator
At a gas station just off Interstate 70, I watch as a cousin of mine in Bentleyville drops a twenty into a Pace-O-Matic console wedged between the lottery counter and single-stall restroom. This slightly bedraggled PennDOT worker, fresh off a long and tedious shift, barely pays attention to the little puzzle the screen flashes before it pays (or doesn’t). Such puzzles and other challenges constitute the whole legal justification for the existence of these machines, and nobody I know who truly enjoys them has ever bothered with it. They play them as slot machines, because that is what they are in spirit, and a win feels better when it occurs at random – you’re buying luck, my cousin tells me – and you didn’t have to waste any precious brainpower on achieving it
Those gaming machines almost decided a primary in my hometown district. On May 19, three-term Republican state Sen. Camera Bartolotta beat challenger Al Buchtan by about six points, 53% to 47%, in the 46th District, which encompasses all of Washington and Greene counties and a sliver of Beaver. The skill-games industry bankrolled the campaign against her after she suggested taxing them, part of a larger play that saw gaming and gambling interests spend more than $8 million across three Senate races involving incumbents the industry reads as future votes for a higher tax. All three incumbents survived. For now, the machines they were fighting over remain untaxed and unregulated –and there are more of them (and more players) every year.
Pennsylvania already runs a lottery, licenses more than a dozen casinos and racetracks, and taxes legal sports betting, all of it under the 2004 Gaming Act. Skill games, by contrast, are not covered. To the untrained eye, they look like slot machines: A player feeds in cash, the money turns into points, and a kindergarten-level memory-or-matching puzzle appears before the payout. Manufacturers argue that the child’s puzzle makes the game one of predominant skill rather than chance, so the Gaming Act and the criminal code can’t reach it. A Beaver County judge agreed back in 2014, a unanimous Commonwealth Court agreed in 2023, and the state Supreme Court heard arguments in November and still has not ruled.
The attorney general’s office put the other view bluntly in its brief, arguing that a machine that looks and plays like a slot machine is one, which accords with increasingly uncommon common sense. Pace-O-Matic's lawyer answered that the same logic would swallow Skee-Ball and the basketball game at Dave & Buster's as those games have swallowed many of my own dollars when my daughter plays them.
The dominant maker of these machines is Pace-O-Matic, a Georgia company whose Pennsylvania Skill consoles are assembled by Miele Manufacturing in Lycoming County. The company places the machines in bars, social clubs, smoke shops, convenience stores, and the VFW and American Legion halls, then splits the take with whatever business hosts the box. That revenue share has made them relatively wealthy.
In the 46th, that wealth was put to good use. The pro-Buchtan committee, Citizens Alliance of Pennsylvania, took $550,000 from a group called Operators for Skill between January and March, then another $950,000 from the same skill-backed PAC and industry executives in April, and spent at least $486,000 attacking Bartolotta with mailers and polling. Operators for Skill is essentially Pace-O-Matic's vehicle, and its spokesman says it backs candidates who stand up for the small businesses and fraternal clubs with whom they share their earnings.
Bartolotta's own war chest came partly from Win for Pennsylvania, a group that Axios traced to FanDuel and DraftKings, which put roughly $200,000 into the 46th and $5 million across the state in April alone. The casinos, which pay a 55% tax on slot revenue, want skill games taxed at their level and pushed out of their lane. On election night, Bartolotta said out-of-state interests “are not going to buy a Senate seat,” and she carried her home county of Washington by nearly 2,000 votes to put the race away.
I emailed her campaign to ask about that sportsbook money, which I’ve critiqued in many other contexts. The relatives of mine who feed the skill machines are in many cases the same ones fat-fingering the FanDuel app at the kitchen table, and what they bet there are parlays, the longest-odds, lowest-hit product on the menu and by a wide margin the most profitable one for the house. Sportsbooks keep nearly four times the margin on a parlay that they keep on a straight bet, and parlays now bring in about two-thirds of their revenue.
My folks stack five and six legs across sports they could not begin to explain, snooker frames and cricket and Australian rugby at two in the morning after their miserable night shifts end, chasing whatever event happens to be live somewhere the sun is still up. Win for Pennsylvania is paid for by the companies that built these atomic habits. Bartolotta’s campaign, like Buchtan’s, did not respond.
I grew up in a Washington County that sent men like Austin Murphy and Frank Mascara to Congress, union Democrats who held this ground for a generation. Murphy himself held the 46th Senate seat in the 1970s, the one Bartolotta sits in now. The seat is the same, but that county is long gone. Trump carried Washington by 22 points in 2020, and across this very rusty belt of old labor counties Republicans now lead by tens of thousands of registered voters.
Bartolotta won in 2014 as that wave was cresting and has since become the establishment it broke against, which in MAGA-era Washington County is its own liability. She voted for Act 77, the 2019 law that expanded mail-in voting before Trump turned on it, and even cautiously defended the Haitian immigrants in nearby Charleroi after the president attacked them. In January the county Republican committee voted 21-3 for no confidence in her. To their credit, the state party answered with nearly $240,000 to hold her seat.
Bartolotta has said that she wants the Legions and Moose lodges to keep their games – the only revenue driver left at such declining establishments patronized by an increasingly geriatric clientele – and when WESA asked what rate she would accept, she said she did not know the number yet. Buchtan called himself “nobody's puppet” and warned a steep tax would drive the machines out of the fire halls. David Taylor of the Pennsylvania Manufacturers' Association, which endorsed Bartolotta, described the spending plainly: a skill games industry trying to seize the Senate majority with members who would vote its way every time.
As for the tax rate: Gov. Josh Shapiro wants 52%, worth about $400 million a year, Senate Republican leaders floated 35, and Pace-O-Matic and state Sen. Gene Yaw want 16. Nothing passed last budget and nothing is promised in this one, so every month of delay is another month of a parallel, untaxed casino running out of gas-station corners while the licensed houses down the road hand the state more than half of each dollar.
For Bartolotta, November looks close to being settled. Republicans hold a 15-point registration edge in the 46th, and Democrat Evan Snyder ran unopposed for that nomination and so has said nothing on the record that I could locate. The contest that counted already happened in the Republican primary, and the money that lost it will be back, here and anywhere a centrist-leaning Republican looks soft enough to push.
Neither party will say the obvious. Most Democrats will not call the machines the addiction they are, not when the venues hosting them are union halls and VFWs in the counties they might not be able to win back but can at least steal away some votes. Republicans will certainly not overtax the “supplemental income” that funds some of their own campaign mailers. And the regulated alternative, the app companies backing Bartolotta, are custom-designed by engineers and statisticians to extract money from the same customer, albeit from the privacy of his home and not in my eyeline whenever my daughter and I frequent one of Washington County’s many down-at-the-heels convenience stores.
My PennDOT cousin will tell you he is up this month, on the machines if not the apps. I can assure you that he is not, though the grubby technicolor box in the corner of that gas station never makes him do the arithmetic. Such magical thinking was the part his understandably tired mind wants to part ways with and the part that both Pace and FanDuel helpfully engineered out. The only people in Pennsylvania still insisting that such gaming takes skill are the ones being paid to say so in order that these companies all pay as little as possible for the damage they’re doing to Pennsylvania’s citizens: our elected officials.
