Texans would have to hand a clerk their driver’s license and let a machine read it before buying a lottery ticket — every ticket, every time, however plainly old the buyer is — under a rule that a state advisory committee voted Sept. 22 to send on for final adoption.
Nothing in Texas law requires that now. The rule in force says only that “Retailers shall not sell tickets to persons under the age of 18.” and leaves the clerk to work out how to know. The new language would swap that judgment for a device: a retailer would have to electronically read the barcode on a buyer’s driver’s license or state ID card at the counter, and may fall back on looking at the card only when the scan will not work.
The change reaches more than 19,000 licensed lottery retailers, most of them convenience stores and gas stations — the count the Texas Lottery published for the end of fiscal 2025, and the most recent one available. They moved about $7.2 billion in tickets over the year that ended Aug. 31, the agency’s chief financial officer told the committee, and the state took $1.82 billion of it for public schools.
It also reaches Texans who do not drive. The rule names three documents and no others — a driver’s license, a commercial driver’s license, and the state personal identification certificate. A passport, a military ID or a tribal ID would not satisfy it as written.
What the committee did discuss was the opposite problem: whether a retailer should ever be allowed to just look at a customer and decide. Presiding officer Kimberly Kiplin, an Austin lawyer who holds the committee’s lottery legal seat, said the state should not ask clerks to make that call.
“I think it puts the retailer in an untenable position to try to exercise judgment on where that bright line is.”
Better, Kiplin said, to “go through the process as it is no matter your age.” A second member answered: “I would agree with you Kim. I thought the same thing. I think keeping it clear and simple for everyone is the right way to go.” The five seated members — the committee has nine seats and four are vacant — then voted without dissent to recommend the package.
The vote followed a briefing from an assistant general counsel on three comment letters the department received over the summer. Two came, he said, from RaceTrac, Inc. and the Texas Food & Fuel Association, which between them speak for a large share of the counters where lottery tickets are sold. Neither has published anything about the proposal, and the department does not post comment letters, so what they asked for is known only from what was said aloud.
The agreed changes he described were narrow: spelling out what counts as a broken scanner, restating a protection retailers already have in statute when a scan clears, and clarifying that a store open around the clock has business hours around the clock.
Whether any of it will cost a retailer anything is a live question the record does not answer. The agency’s budget analyst certified in the proposal that “there are no anticipated economic costs to persons who are required to comply with the proposed rules” and no adverse effect on small or rural businesses. That finding covers a requirement to read a barcode at every lottery transaction in the state. No one at the meeting asked what hardware that takes or who buys it.
There is a real case for the rule, and the agency makes it: the Legislature ordered age verification last year and left the method to be set by rule, so someone had to choose one, and scanning is the method that already works. Lottery vending machines in Texas have required a scan since late 2024. State law already shields a retailer from discipline when a scan comes back valid, which gives stores a reason to want the scan on the record. The department’s stated benefit is to “help ensure that only adults can purchase lottery tickets”.
The committee only recommends; the Texas Commission of Licensing and Regulation adopts. Staff said the package is aimed at the commission’s Oct. 28 meeting. What reaches that meeting may not be what the committee endorsed: the department already rewrote one provision after the committee signed off in July, in a version the proposal concedes differs from the one the members had backed, “which exempted lottery vending machines from the limitation.” The committee does not expect to meet again until December.
A bigger footprint. The interim deputy executive director for lottery and charitable bingo said the Walgreens paperwork is done and the agency is on pace to add “another 638 retailer locations with the first stores targeted for January 2027” — a roughly three percent expansion of a retail network that has been shrinking for three years. A new game, and old machinery. The agency’s 2028–29 budget request includes $290,000 to launch a new Texas-only draw game in fiscal 2029, the first addition to the draw portfolio in years, plus $572,000 for cybersecurity. A member asked pointedly whether the new game would use a random number generator; staff said it would keep the traditional machines and balls. Moving bingo off the lottery’s books. The request also seeks about $3.8 million a year in general revenue to cover charitable bingo costs now paid out of the lottery account — a Sunset Advisory Commission recommendation that, staff said, would free that money for the Foundation School Fund.