VGW Paid 24 Alabama Lawmakers, Senate Leaders Included

VGW, the company behind Chumba Casino and Global Poker, paid 24 sitting Alabama legislators in 2026, and two of them are among the three ranking Republicans in the state Senate. President Pro Tempore Garlan Gudger received $15,000 directly and another $30,000 from a PAC VGW funded; Majority Leader Steve Livingston received $7,500. We counted the list out of the Secretary of State's own extract rather than taking it from anyone's summary.

We reported the top-line number on September 5: $540,500 into Alabama campaign accounts, starting from nothing in 2025. Al.com published its own account on the morning of September 20, putting the figure at $351,000 and naming four recipients - Tuberville, Chris Elliott, Andrew Jones and Greg Albritton - along with FORGE PAC, which it describes as Gudger's leadership committee. We could not load that page from this machine and have read it only in syndication, so nothing below is taken from it except where we say so.

What the state file adds is the rest of the list, the two leadership titles above, and a second flow nobody has published: three PACs that VGW helped fund paid 11 of the same people again.

Who got VGW's money directly?

The 2026 Cash Contribution extract, stamped 02:34 on September 20 and holding 138,149 rows, carries 37 contributions from the operator totalling $540,500, dated between March 30 and August 31. They break into three piles.

Matching is done on city and ZIP rather than name, because the filer spelled the company five wrong ways and mistyped the street number three ways. Every one of the 37 rows carrying Boulder, Colorado and ZIP 80308 is a VGW entity, and no other contributor in the file carries that pair. Thirty-five rows are filed as VGW Luckyland Inc and two as VGW US Inc.

Running each recipient committee ID through the state's committee lookup returns office, district, party and status. That gives 18 people with Senate committees and 7 with House committees, 11 Republicans and 14 Democrats between them. Checking each district against the legislature's own current roster then separates the incumbents from the challengers: 17 of the 18 Senate recipients hold the seat their committee is registered for, and all 7 House recipients do. The exception is John Roberts, whose committee was registered on July 1, 2025 for Senate District 2, a seat currently held by Senator Tom Butler. Roberts is a candidate, not a sitting senator, and he is the only one on the list.

So the sitting-legislator count is 24, not the 25 committees suggest. The largest legislative cheque, $27,500, went to Senator Andrew Jones of District 10. Senator Will Barfoot, who holds District 25 and is filed by the state as Charles Barfoot, appears twice for $17,500: $10,000 to his active District 25 committee and $7,500 to a District 26 committee he registered in December 2025 and has since dissolved.

Which PACs did VGW fund, and who else funds them?

This is the part that changes the picture. VGW is not an outlier donor in Alabama gaming politics. It is giving into the same three vehicles as the commercial sports-betting lobby and the state's federally recognised tribe.

VGW is the second-largest single donor to North Alabama PAC and the third-largest to FORGE PAC. Those two PACs spent $1,067,612.58 and $995,444.49 respectively during 2026, most of it on advertising, polling and direct contributions to campaigns.

FORGE PAC is the one to watch. It is registered in Cullman, which is Senator Gudger's home city, and al.com describes it as his leadership committee. We have not seen a filing that names its officers, so we report the registration and the characterisation separately rather than as one fact. What the disbursement file shows is not in dispute: of the nine candidate committees FORGE PAC paid $17,000 or more during 2026, six belong to people who had also taken a VGW cheque directly, and VGW put $42,500 into the PAC.

Which lawmakers got paid twice?

Eleven recipients took a direct VGW contribution and also received money from a PAC VGW helps fund. PAC money is commingled by design, so no individual payment below can be traced to a VGW dollar. What the records establish is the pattern, not a route.

Three notes on matching. The state's committee record for District 27 reads "James Hovey" while FORGE PAC's payee line reads "Jay Hovey Campaign". FORGE PAC also paid a separate "Dan Roberts Campaign" $50,000, a different person and a sitting senator for District 15, which is not counted above. And Representative Sam Jones is paid by both PACs under two spellings, "JONES SAM" and "JONES Samuel", at the same Mobile PO box: $2,000 from North Alabama in April and $3,000 from Alabama Works in August.

Two names are worth pausing on, and they point in opposite directions. Senator Gregory Albritton sponsored SB293 and SB294 in the 2022 session, the pair of bills that would have created an Alabama Education Lottery and Gambling Commission; both were indefinitely postponed in the house of origin. Senator Merika Coleman, who received $5,000 and does not appear in the table above, is the sponsor of SB257, the only gaming-framework bill filed in the Senate in 2026. It never left the Tourism committee.

Is any other sweepstakes casino giving in Alabama?

No. We searched the 2026 file for roughly 65 corporate name strings covering all 33 brands in our review database and their known parents, from Yellow Social Interactive and Blazesoft to High 5, Stake and B-Two Operations. VGW is the only sweepstakes-casino operator that appears. Set against the wider gambling sector, it is third:

The caveat is the obvious one. An operator giving through an unrelated LLC name would not surface in a name search, and we cannot rule that out.

Alabama is also not the whole programme. Federal records show VGW Luckyland Inc gave $25,000 to a Kentucky super PAC on March 23, 2026, a week before its first Alabama cheque, and that committee spent the spring on Kentucky state House races. Kentucky has no sweepstakes ban either.

Is there an Alabama sweepstakes bill to buy influence over?

Not yet. A full-text search of the legislature's own bill database returns 28 instruments in Alabama history containing "sweepstakes", and the only one from the 2026 session is HB303, an enacted cryptocurrency-kiosk fraud measure. The three gaming bills filed in 2026 - SB257, first read February 3 and sent to the Senate Tourism committee, plus HB448 and HB449, both first read February 12 - were lottery and gaming-commission measures, and all three are still recorded as pending committee action in the house of origin.

That absence is the point. Alabama has not banned sweepstakes casinos and no regulator is pursuing them, which is why our Alabama state page rates the state restricted rather than banned, and why Chumba Casino and Global Poker still take Alabama players. VGW's third brand is not in that sentence any more: LuckyLand Slots closed to play on August 24 and shut redemptions on September 14, six days ago. The money is arriving before the legislation, not in response to it.

There is a historical footnote with some bite. In 2021 Senator Del Marsh filed SB311, which would have restricted campaign contributions by gaming operators. It did not become law.

What should an Alabama player take from this?

Nothing about your account changes today. What changes is what you watch. Our Alabama state page sets out the live risk, which is civil rather than criminal: a loss-recovery statute from 1852 that lets a player sue an operator, and the run of class actions it has produced, including a federal RICO claim against Stake.us. If a sweepstakes bill appears in the 2027 session, the names in the table above are the ones to read it against, and the two leadership titles are the ones that decide whether it gets a hearing.

We are not alleging that any legislator did anything improper. Corporate contributions to Alabama candidates are lawful, capped only by disclosure, and the operator is entitled to make them. Al.com reports that a VGW representative declined to comment on the company's interest in Alabama races; we have put no questions to the company ourselves. Every figure above comes from files we downloaded and parsed ourselves, which is how we check what we publish. Corporate background on the group sits on our VGW operator profile.

Sources & documents

• Alabama FCPA bulk data index (file list and refresh timestamps)
• 2026 Cash Contribution extract (138,149 rows, stamped September 20, 2026)
• 2026 Expenditure extract (PAC disbursements)
• Alabama FCPA committee search (office, district and party per committee ID)
• Alabama Legislature bill search and its public data endpoint (28 "sweepstakes" instruments; SB257 sponsored by Coleman (M); HB448 and HB449 by Ensler; HB303; SB293, SB294 and SB311 with sponsors and outcomes)
• Alabama Senate members (the 35-seat current roster and the leadership titles, read through the same endpoint; district-by-district it is what separates the 24 incumbents from the one candidate)
• Google News feed (the September 20 al.com headline that prompted the re-check; al.com itself returns 403 to us, and the syndicated copy we read is on Yahoo)

21+ only. Sweepstakes play is entertainment, not income. If it stops feeling like a game, call 1-800-GAMBLER or see our responsible gaming resources for free, confidential help.