How to run a raffle or giveaway draw that everyone trusts

A raffle has a job most random draws don't: it has to be fair and look fair to a room full of people who'd quite like to win. Pull folded tickets from a bowl and you've already lost half the battle — the last ones in sit on top, a stiff fold is easier to grab, and the person who bought twenty tickets has no way to confirm they actually got twenty chances. For a fundraiser, a community giveaway, or a classroom prize, "trust me, it was random" isn't good enough. A draw people can watch happen, and re-check afterwards, is.

One line per entrant, tickets after an "x"

The raffle / giveaway drawer takes your entrants as a plain list — one name per line. The twist that makes it a raffle rather than a name picker is the ticket count: write Alice x5 and Alice holds five tickets, Ben x2 holds two, and a bare Dimitri with no number quietly counts as one. If you'd rather not type the "x", a comma, colon, or semicolon works too — Carla, 8 and Carla x8 mean the same thing. Anyone you list without a number isn't penalised; they simply hold a single ticket, which is exactly what you want for a flat "one entry each" giveaway.

That little syntax is the whole point of using a raffle tool instead of a generic picker. Buying more tickets is supposed to buy better odds, and here it literally does — the count after the name is the number of chances that person gets in the pool.

Odds that are exactly proportional, by design

Under the hood, the drawer adds up every ticket and picks a winner with a probability exactly proportional to their share of that total. If the pool holds 19 tickets and Carla has 8 of them, she wins roughly 8 times in 19 — no more, no less. The selection uses your browser's cryptographic random source rather than the cheap randomness most web pages reach for, so there's no drift, no favouring whoever's at the top of the list, and no subtle bias toward round numbers. It's the property a physical bowl can never quite promise: every ticket, genuinely, is one equal chance.

Multiple prizes, and why removing a winner removes them entirely

Most draws have more than one prize, so set How many winners? above one and the tool pulls them one at a time. The behaviour to understand here is the Remove winner after drawing option, which is on by default. With it on, once someone wins they're taken out of the pool completely — and "completely" means all of their tickets, not just one. Alice doesn't get to win the second prize on her remaining four tickets; winning the first prize retires her whole entry. That's almost always what you want for a tiered draw: one prize per person, first place drawn first, then second from everyone left.

Turn that option off and the opposite happens — winners stay in the pool and can be drawn again, which only makes sense for the rare case where the same entrant is genuinely allowed to win twice. For everyday giveaways, leave it on and draw down the prize list in order, top prize first.

A seed turns a draw into something people can re-check

Here's the feature that separates a trustworthy public draw from "you'll have to take my word for it." There's an optional Seed field, and it's the key to a verifiable raffle. Leave it blank and every draw is freshly, unpredictably random — the right default. But type any word or number into it and the draw becomes reproducible: the same list of entrants with the same seed always produces the same winners, in the same order. Announce the seed alongside the result — "drawn with seed spring-fundraiser-2026" — and anyone who doubts you can paste the public entrant list and that seed into the tool themselves and watch it land on exactly the same names. The randomness stops being a private act and becomes something the whole room can audit after the fact.

Private, offline, and easy to keep a record of

Your entrant list never leaves your device. The whole draw runs in your browser, so names and ticket counts are never uploaded to a server, and the tool keeps working with no connection at all — handy when you're drawing live at a venue with patchy wifi. When you're done, the winners come back as a tidy ranked list you can copy or export as a CSV, which is exactly what you want to paste into a record of who won what for the fundraiser's books.

When a different tool is the cleaner fit

Tickets are the raffle drawer's reason to exist, so if nobody has more chances than anyone else you may not need them. For an even-odds draw of several winners from one flat list, a random multiple winners picker is more direct. If you only ever pull a single name, a random single picker does it in one click. And if you want weighting for something that isn't a prize draw at all — nudging a decision, loading the dice on a choice — a weighted random picker is the general-purpose version of the same proportional draw.

Draw a winner nobody can argue with

The reason to run a raffle on a tool rather than a hat isn't speed — it's that the result holds up. Tickets that count for exactly what they should, winners removed cleanly between prizes, and a seed anyone can replay turn "it was random, honest" into something you can actually show. List your entrants, add their tickets, pick how many prizes you're giving away, and let the raffle drawer pull a winner the whole room can believe in.