Bill to Legalize Sports Gambling in Washington State Advances to Potential Final House Vote

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Legalized sports gambling within Washington state’s tribal casinos took another step Tuesday toward becoming reality this year.

A House appropriations committee voted 25-7 to forward sports gambling bill HB 2638 to a possible full floor vote before the March 13 end of this year’s shortened legislative session. If passed by the House, then followed with a similar Senate vote on companion bill SB 6394, the sports-gambling initiative could be forwarded to Gov. Jay Inslee by spring.

“I’m hoping to get this moving over to the Senate on a relatively fast timeline,” HB 2638 sponsor Rep. Strom Peterson, D-Edmonds, said in an interview moments after Tuesday’s early evening vote. “We’ll see if that happens, but with a very bi-partisan vote that we just had this evening, I think that helps.”

Peterson said with so much support from both parties, he figures it “a formality” a floor vote will be held quickly. “I’m hoping that we can get it on to the floor next week,” he said. “It’s a lift. ... I still need to talk to a lot of people about it and make everybody comfortable with it, because it is an expansion of gambling.”

This is now the furthest any sports-gambling legislation has gotten in this state, which has some of the nation’s toughest anti-gambling laws. Floor votes in both legislatures require a 60% majority to pass gambling-expansion legislation.



Rep. Drew Stokesbary, the committee’s ranking Republican, voted in favor of the proposal.

“This is a reasonable middle ground,” Stokesbary told the committee moments before the vote. “I think it threads the needle nicely. It permits adults who are responsible to engage in an activity that doesn’t harm other people. But it doesn’t make it so prevalent or so pervasive in our society that we as a legislature have to worry about the morality and ethics of that.”

Sports betting became a hot topic nationwide after the U.S. Supreme Court in May 2018 struck down a 1992 federal law prohibiting such gaming in most states. Since the law’s repeal, it’s been up to individual states to decide their own sports-gambling course and 14 have now legalized it, with roughly two dozen more working through legislation to do so.

HB 2638 impacts up to 29 existing tribal casinos throughout the state — including heavyweights such as Muckleshoot, Tulalip and Emerald Queen — and covers both professional and college sports as well as Olympic events and e-sports. But gambling on games involving Washington colleges, both public and private, would still be outlawed under the bill.