Raffle drum

Drawing in front of a room

A school fair raffle is not really about randomness. It is about the room watching the draw happen: the drum turning, the pause, the number read out. A list of winners produced in an office afterwards is a perfectly fair draw that nobody enjoys and everybody wonders about.

So put this on the big screen, set the range to the tickets you actually sold, and turn the drum where everybody can see it. The winners stay on screen in draw order, which is what you need for the noticeboard and for the person who arrives ten minutes late.

Tickets you sold, or names you have

For a ticketed raffle, set the range to the numbers on the stubs: one to two hundred, or fifty to ninety-nine if that is the book you sold from. Every number in the range is in the drum once, which is the bit a shuffled spreadsheet gets wrong when somebody sells the same number twice.

For a club or a classroom, switch to names and everybody in the roster gets one ticket. That roster is the same one the hat draw and the lives tracker use, so a group that plays a few things types its names once.

Several prizes, and nobody twice

Most raffles have a first, a second and a third prize, and most of them also have a rule that one person cannot take all three. Taking the winner out is on by default for exactly that reason, and the drum counts down so the room can see the odds improving.

Turn it off when a ticket should stay in, which is how a spot prize or a door prize usually works. If the draw is a name rather than a ticket and you want the spectacle instead, the wheel does the same job with a pointer.

Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for

The tool runs entirely in your browser. There is no account, nothing you make is uploaded, and nothing you type is sent anywhere or put into a link.

The page itself is not silent, though: it carries advertising code and a visit counter that sets no cookie, and the cookie page says exactly what each of those does.

There are no stakes here. Nothing is wagered, nothing of value is won, and the draw is a party mechanic, not a lottery.

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