From the campaign
The State Should Not Balance Its Budget on Broken Homes
SJR 504 is on your November ballot. If it passes, every phone in South Dakota becomes a casino, and I am asking you to vote no.
I respect the choices adults make. If a South Dakotan wants to play video lottery after work, or put twenty dollars on a football game in Deadwood, that is his business and not mine.
What I oppose is a different thing entirely. I oppose the state expanding gambling, marketing it, and then depending on the money to fund government, because that revenue gets collected disproportionately from addiction. South Dakota should never hold a financial interest in its own citizens losing.
This fall you will vote on SJR 504, a constitutional amendment legalizing mobile sports betting statewide. The Senate passed it 23 to 10 in February. If it passes in November, every phone in this state becomes a casino. Every kitchen table, every break room, every dorm room, and every teenager's bedroom with a borrowed login.
I am voting no and I am asking you to vote no with me.
Sports betting in Deadwood is a destination. A person makes a decision, gets in a car, and drives there. Sports betting on a phone is something else: an engine that never closes, tuned by some of the best behavioral scientists money can hire. The states that legalized it are watching the results come in now, and the results are bankruptcies, drained savings, and young men in particular carrying debt they hide from the people they live with.
Why this sits in the family plank and not the vice plank
I run a nonprofit that works with families at the point where they come apart, and I have heard thousands of accounts of what actually breaks them. Addiction is near the top of that list every time, and gambling addiction is the quiet one. Nothing on the breath. No slurred speech. Just money that was supposed to be the mortgage payment, gone, and a spouse who finds out months after it mattered.
The state of South Dakota should not be a partner in that arrangement. When the legislature votes to raise video lottery bet limits or add machines, the way the 2025 bills tried to, that is not the state respecting personal freedom. That is the state taking a larger cut of family wreckage.
Where I stand
This is the answer I gave Family Voice Action for their 2026 voter guide, and it is what I will carry to Pierre:
The state shouldn't balance its budget on broken homes. A casino in every pocket puts addiction and debt within reach of every child. Families come first, always.
In practice that means opposing SJR 504 on your November ballot, opposing video lottery expansion whether it arrives as more machines or higher bet limits, strengthening problem-gambling resources for the families already fighting this, and protecting minors from gambling exposure and marketing.
Somebody will tell me this is a small issue next to taxes and schools. Ask a family living it whether it feels small. Gambling addiction drives bankruptcy, divorce, and child support failure, and all three of those land in the systems I am running to fix. Keeping a casino out of every pocket costs less than repairing what it breaks. The other objections I hear are answered below.
Read the full platform at zac4sd.com, and remember SJR 504 when you turn your ballot over this November.
Families come first. Always.
Anticipated pushbacks · prepared responses
Common questions on this issue
These are the questions and concerns that come up most often. The responses below are my honest answers, not talking points.
- Q. Gambling revenue funds education and important programs.
- A. State revenue should never come at the expense of the families paying taxes to support it. Gambling-funded programs trade one family's education benefit for another family's addiction, and that is not a trade South Dakota should accept. Fund government with honest taxes rather than on the backs of addicted citizens.
- Q. Adults should make their own choices about gambling.
- A. They can and they will. Nothing I support removes anyone's ability to gamble where it is legal today. What I oppose is the state pushing more gambling in front of every South Dakotan through phones, apps, and expanded venues. Personal responsibility and state promotion of addictive behavior are not the same thing. Individual choice is preserved. State expansion is not owed to anybody.