On a single day — May 5, 2025 — Save Our Local Businesses Illinois PAC (IL EAIN 39860) wrote twenty-two separate $1,000 checks to Chicago alderperson committees. Two weeks earlier, the same PAC had handed $10,000 to the former chair of the Illinois House Gaming Committee. Every figure on this site is sourced to Illinois State Board of Elections filings, City of Chicago ordinance records, Illinois Gaming Board disciplinary complaints, and published reporting. Follow the money.
The May 20, 2026 floor vote on the sweepstakes-machine ban did not happen as scheduled. Ald. Beale's effort to push the measure through the full Council fell short without the necessary support — a public signal of weak leadership inside the Council chamber. The vote is now scheduled for June 20, 2026. The same alderperson who led the December 2025 push to legalize regulated VGTs is now leaning on Council colleagues to ban the sweepstakes machines that compete for the same customers.
Of the 18 members of the Chicago City Council Committee on License and Consumer Protection — the committee with direct jurisdiction over Chicago's sweepstakes-machine licensing — 9 received $1,000 each from Save Our Local Businesses Illinois PAC on the same day: May 5, 2025.
One year later, that same committee — chaired by Silverstein — voted to pass the sweepstakes-machine ban out of committee, sending it to the full Council.
Alderpersons who have sponsored video-gaming legalization ordinances, received documented gaming-industry contributions, or both. Click any card for the full record and sources.
Save Our Local Businesses Illinois PAC (IL EAIN 39860) wrote a $10,000 check to the former chair of the Illinois House Gaming Committee — then, two weeks later, wrote twenty-two $1,000 checks to Chicago alderperson committees on the same day. The full distribution below.
Three terminal operators control IGB licenses for roughly 68% of Illinois's video gaming establishments. All three have been respondents in formal Illinois Gaming Board disciplinary complaints.
Illinois Gaming Board complaints filed against video gaming terminal operators. Click any docket to expand the full allegations and disposition.
The conversation around sweepstakes-style electronic entertainment in Chicago has been driven by competing industry interests and Council politics — not by the underlying legal and economic record. Here are the facts that get left out of the headlines.
Promotional sweepstakes in Illinois are governed by the Illinois Prizes and Gifts Act (815 ILCS 525). These operations are not unregulated — they are subject to oversight by the Office of the Illinois Attorney General, which has statutory authority over consumer-protection and promotional-prize law in the state.
This is not a one-off. Federal convictions and decade-old reporting describe the same dynamic in different forms.
Ordinance filings, PAC disbursements, and contributions clustered around procedural moments in the gaming-policy fight. Timing does not establish causation; the patterns are presented for evaluation against the underlying public record.
Every claim on this site is sourced to one of the records below. Public records (ordinances, court filings, regulatory complaints, state campaign-finance filings) are the spine; published reporting is cited where it adds context that public records alone do not.