News-Record.com

From the same story on lottery revenues mentioned here:

(Lottery Director Tom) Shaheen also asked lottery commissioners for permission to draw up a marketing plan that would include Spanish language advertising. According to the lottery, 6 percent of the retailers who sell tickets serve customers who are primarily Spanish-speaking.

Commission member Bridget-Anne Hampden called the idea "an opportunity" and other commission members agreed, saying the lottery ignored Spanish-speakers at its peril.

The commission is likely to move cautiously to avoid running afoul of part of the lottery law that prohibits the agency from "targeting" any one minority, ethnic or other group through advertising.

The N+O writes more on the topic here.

The actual language from the lottery statute reads:

a. All advertising shall include resources for responsible gaming information.

b. No advertising may intentionally target specific groups or economic classes.

c. No advertising may be misleading, deceptive, or present any lottery game as a means of relieving any person's financial or personal difficulties.

d. No advertising may have the primary purpose of inducing persons to participate in the Lottery.

(Not having looked at this statute in years, I must say provision (d) looks particularly dumb - why advertise if not to induce people to play?)

The section in question here is (b), which prohibits targeting of specific "groups or economic class."

Back when the lottery law was being written, there was some concern that lotteries pulled money out of poorer communities more so than wealthier communities. Those concerns were fed by stories like this one from the Washington Post in 1998:

Those contrasting images reveal a fundamental truth about what the lotteries in Maryland, Virginia and the District have become: a $2.2 billion- a-year cash cow that relies on a hard core of heavy players, who, on average, have less education and lower incomes than the population as a whole, according to lottery documents and data. The heavy players also include a much higher percentage of minorities.

For example, 61 percent of Virginia Lottery sales to the state's residents are made to just 8 percent of all Virginia adults, according to 1995-96 lottery survey data obtained by The Washington Post. Of that small pool of heavy gamblers, one in five never finished high school, and more than one in three were African Americans, roughly double the rates among all Virginia adults surveyed.

Those heavy Virginia players on average spent $47 for lottery tickets in two weeks, the equivalent of more than $1,200 annually. Yet one in six had household incomes of less than $15,000, according to the lottery data.

So the question is whether Spanish language advertising would be "targeting" or merely translating the same message everyone else gets so that everybody can understand it.

At the lottery commission meeting yesterday, the latter view seemed to hold sway, which was backed up in this quote from the N+O story:

"If you're only doing it in English, you're targeting a specific group," said Tony Asion, executive director of the statewide advocacy group El Pueblo. "It's just a matter of making it available."

Of course, lottery opponents who wanted to put up a fuss about this might look at the Census data used in this AP story from August, which found:

In North Carolina, the report found more than 1 million people, or 14 percent of the state population, living in poverty. While the national poverty rate held steady at 12.5 percent, poverty did rise among some groups. Latinos, children and the foreign-born – demographic categories that overlap considerably – experienced significant increases.

That census data can be found here and here.

Of course, none of that says that all Spanish speakers are poor and/or uneducated. So I don't know if you can make a case based on demographic trends that merely translating a marketing message into Spanish is "targeting" a vulnerable population.

The lottery staff is due to bring this back to the commission at its next meeting, and I imagine this debate might get a fair amount of attention then.