«History of Online Gambling in the State of New Jersey

American attitude towards gambling, especially gambling online, is quite ambiguous and by no means one-sided. The history of American gambling has experienced numerous ups and downs with curious and even at times silly situations. Nevertheless, America has constantly been trying to better its legislation system aimed at Internet casinos along with online poker-rooms. Not always does it bring the desired result. Let’s take, for example, Minnesota Airport with its unsuccessful project to give a start to online gaming and launch online casinos. However, in spite of all the failures experiments keep coming.

New Jersey challenged its citizens' right to gambling and became one of the few first states to legalize and later on regulate Internet gambling within the state. Let us remind that the very first attempt to pass the bill was made by Raymond Lesniak, the state senator, in January 2010. His bill in the Senate and a similar bill introduced by the American Assembly would have permitted licensed casinos in Atlantic City to offer their services to New Jersey citizens willing to gamble online.

In November 2010 the New JerseySenate passed Lesniak’s bill and it became the first bill legalizing this kind of business and allowing people to gamble online that was voted for. But due to numerous amendments, the law was finally approved only in the beginning of 2011. While the bill was being approved, the senators faced another problem. In spite of all the support provided by the legislative assembly of the state, Governor Chris Christie vetoed the bill legalizing gambling on the Internet in the beginning of 2011. Back then, according to Christie’s report regarding his vetoing, he blamed it all on “a few major juridical obstacles”.

In the beginning of 2012 Lesniak started working on another bill. That was an amendment to the bill previously approved in 2011. Also, its main target was to improve the quality of services offered by online casino operators and guarantee online gamblers safety and security of their private data, and, of course, timely and accurate payouts. The history repeated itself. Governor Chris Christie vetoed the bill again. This time he demanded that the taxes paid by online gaming operators should be raised from 10% to 15%. Even though this idea was unpopular, the proposed amendment passed and was included in the law. After the amendments were included in the bill, it was signed by Governor Chris Christie and it was forwarded to the highest legislative body of the state. Finally, on February 26, 2013, New Jersey became a US state where gambling in the web was absolutely legal and totally regulated by the authorities. New Jersey is known to be the third state whose government tried to legalize online gambling and made it quite an impressive source of money used to supply the budget of the state.

Also, there was an active campaign the purpose of which was establishment of partnership between casinos and Internet providers. Legalizing licenses were issued by a special body. All 12 casinos existing in Atlantic City applied and registered in a special database. But none of them has been approved yet. The sites are still expected to have been launched by November 23, 2013. Unfortunately, it is quite possible, though, that this date might be postponed.