Random Picker

How to use

1. Paste your entries, one per line — blank lines and stray spaces are ignored.
2. Say how many to draw, and whether one entry may win more than once.
3. Press Draw. A fresh seed is generated and shown with the result.
4. To prove the draw was fair, publish the seed first and let anyone repeat it here.

Features

• Seeded: the same list and seed always give the same winners.
• A proper Fisher-Yates shuffle, not the biased sort trick.
• Draw with or without putting winners back.
• Duplicate lines are kept — two people with the same name each get a ticket.
• Runs entirely in your browser; the list is never uploaded.

Frequently asked questions

Why does the seed matter?

Because an unseeded draw cannot be checked. Nothing stops an organiser from re-rolling until they like the result, and nobody watching can tell. Publish the seed before the draw — in the post, in the stream, wherever the entries are — and anyone can paste the same list here afterwards and confirm the winners for themselves.

Is it actually random?

It is a deterministic generator, which is the point: given the seed it is reproducible, and given only the winners it is not predictable in any way that matters for a giveaway. For anything where money or safety depends on unpredictability — keys, passwords, lotteries — use a source of true randomness instead.

What is wrong with sorting by Math.random()?

It is the most common way to shuffle a list and it is not a shuffle. The comparator gives inconsistent answers, which browsers' sort algorithms are not designed for, and the result stays noticeably close to the original order. This uses Fisher-Yates, where every arrangement is equally likely.

Are duplicate entries removed?

No. Two lines reading "Nguyễn Văn A" are two tickets, which is usually what a raffle means. If you want one entry per person, deduplicate the list first — the sort and deduplicate tool does exactly that.

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