What does the Raffle Generator do?
The Raffle Generator draws winners from a list of names, and gives more tickets more chances. Paste the list, say how many winners you want, press Draw. Anyone who bought extra tickets gets a comma and a number after their name, like Ben, 3. A line with no number is one ticket.
Here's a real draw. The list was five names, twelve tickets, three prizes:
Ana, 5 · Ben, 3 · Chris · Dana, 2 · Eli
3 winners drawn from 5 names and 12 tickets.
1. Ana — Ticket #1 · held 5 of 12 tickets in the drum (41.67%)
2. Eli — Ticket #12 · held 1 of 7 tickets in the drum (14.29%)
3. Dana — Ticket #11 · held 2 of 6 tickets in the drum (33.33%)
Every line tells you three things: who won, which ticket came out, and the odds that person had at that moment. Winners come out in draw order, so line 1 is first prize. Press Copy results and the whole block, header included, lands in your clipboard ready for an email or a group chat.
Most online raffle tools want an account, a campaign page and a monthly plan before they'll pull one name. Some cap the free version at 100 entries, or stamp a watermark on the results until you upgrade. This one is just the drum. Your list stays in your browser, and nobody asks for an email address.
Why a raffle needs more than a name picker
If everyone has one entry and there's one prize, a random name picker does the job. Raffles are rarely that simple. The fight after a raffle is never about the winner. It's about the method.
Three things go wrong when you run a raffle with a plain picker:
- Extra tickets get lost. Somebody bought ten tickets for the school fundraiser. To weight them in a name picker, you'd have to paste their name ten times and hope you counted right.
- The same person wins twice. Pick three names from a list with duplicates and the ten-ticket buyer can walk off with first and third prize. Most prize raffles are one prize per person.
- Nobody can check it. "The computer picked Dana" is a hard sentence to defend in a room full of parents who each bought five tickets.
The Raffle Generator fixes all three. Ticket counts are weights. A winner's tickets leave the drum with them. And every result shows its working — the ticket number, the tickets held, the tickets left, the percentage — so anyone can redo the maths on a napkin.
It works the same for a PTA bake sale with 40 names, a charity gala with 3,000 tickets sold, a streamer's giveaway, or an office picking who gets the good parking spot this month. Same tool, same odds, same audit trail.
How the Raffle Generator draws winners
Think of an actual drum full of paper stubs. That's the model, step by step.
1. Every name gets a numbered block of tickets, in list order. In the example above, the tickets are handed out like this:
| Name | Tickets | Ticket numbers | Chance on the first draw |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ana | 5 | #1 – #5 | 41.67% |
| Ben | 3 | #6 – #8 | 25% |
| Chris | 1 | #9 | 8.33% |
| Dana | 2 | #10 – #11 | 16.67% |
| Eli | 1 | #12 | 8.33% |
2. One ticket is pulled from all the tickets still in the drum. Every ticket has the same chance. The draw picks a stub, not a name, which is exactly why five tickets beat one.
3. The winner's whole block comes out with them. Ana won with ticket #1, so tickets #1 to #5 leave. Seven remain. Eli's single ticket is now 1 in 7, which is the 14.29% you see on line 2.
4. Repeat until you have enough winners. After Eli goes, six tickets are left. Dana holds two of them: 33.33%.
Each draw starts from a fresh 32-bit seed made by your browser's cryptographic random generator. The tickets are then picked with rejection sampling, a method that throws away the rare values that would tilt the odds toward low ticket numbers. We ran the same 5–3–2 list through 200,000 draws: first place went 49.95% / 29.99% / 20.06%, against a target of 50 / 30 / 20.
Setting up your raffle list
The Raffle Generator has only two controls: the list, and how many winners. The list is where the detail lives. These all work:
| You type | The tool reads |
|---|---|
Chris | Chris, 1 ticket |
Ben, 3 | Ben, 3 tickets |
Chris, 4 tickets | Chris, 4 tickets |
Ben[tab]3 (two spreadsheet columns) | Ben, 3 tickets |
Ana, 1,000 | Ana, 1,000 tickets |
Smith, John, 2 | "Smith, John", 2 tickets |
| The same name on three lines | One entrant, tickets added up |
That last row matters more than it looks. Plenty of ticket exports list one row per ticket sold. Paste that export straight in. Repeated names merge — capitals and extra spaces are ignored — and a note tells you how many lines were folded together.
Under the box you'll see a live count, like 12 names · 40 tickets. Check it against your sales sheet before you draw. If those two numbers don't match your records, fix the list now, not after the winner has been announced.
The winners box takes any whole number up to the number of names in the draw, with a ceiling of 1,000. Ask for three winners from two names and you get a plain answer: "You asked for 3 winners, but only 2 names are in the draw."
Mistakes get named by line. Ana, 0 gets "0 tickets can never win." Ana, 2.5 gets "tickets come in whole numbers, like 3." The tool never guesses what you meant.
What extra tickets actually buy you
Here's the part people get wrong. Five tickets out of ten is a 50% chance at first prize. With two prizes, it isn't a 50% chance at each one — and it isn't 100% either.
Take a three-person raffle, Ana with 5 tickets, Ben with 3, Chris with 2, and two prizes. Because a winner's tickets leave the drum, the odds for the second prize depend on who went first. Add it all up and the chance of each person taking home something looks like this:
| Name | Tickets | Chance at first prize | Chance of winning either prize | 200,000 test draws |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ana | 5 | 50% | 83.93% | 84.00% |
| Ben | 3 | 30% | 67.50% | 67.78% |
| Chris | 2 | 20% | 48.57% | 48.22% |
Ana holds 2.5 times Chris's tickets, but her chance of a prize is only about 1.7 times his. That's the effect of one-prize-per-person: once a big holder wins, their spare tickets stop counting, and everyone else's odds go up. The more prizes you offer, the stronger the effect. If you're setting ticket prices, "5 tickets for the price of 4" is still a real deal — just not five times the prize.
Running a raffle people trust
The Raffle Generator handles the draw. That's the easy part. Here's what keeps the room happy afterwards.
Give same-named people a surname or initial
Two different Sams on the list become one Sam with both sets of tickets, because repeated names merge. Write Sam K and Sam R and they stay separate.
Draw in front of people
Share your screen or put it on the projector. The live count under the box shows everyone the list is complete before you press Draw.
Copy the results before you touch anything
Editing the list, or the winners box, clears the result on purpose — a winner list that no longer matches the names above it is worse than none. The draw isn't saved anywhere, so press Copy results first and paste it into an email or chat. That copy is your record.
Use Draw one more for no-shows
If first prize goes to someone who left early, press Draw one more. Everyone already called stays exactly where they are and one new name joins the bottom. Pressing Draw again, by contrast, runs a completely new draw — only do that if you really mean to start over.
Check the rules before you sell tickets
Raffle law varies a lot between countries, states and cities. Licences, who can enter, and whether a purchase can be required are all local questions. The tool picks winners; it doesn't make a raffle legal.
Related generators
Different draws, different tools. For one quick pick with no tickets involved, the Random Name Picker is faster. To put a whole list in random order — speaking slots, a playing order for a tournament — use the List Randomizer. Splitting a group rather than choosing from it? The Team Generator deals names into balanced teams. If your raffle runs on paper stubs with printed numbers, the Random Number Generator can pull a number between 1 and your last stub. And for settling who goes first, there's always the Coin Flip or the Dice Roller.
Frequently asked questions
Can I use this for a social media giveaway?
Yes. Copy the list of people who entered, paste it in, and draw. Watch the duplicates. Repeated names add up, so someone who commented five times holds five tickets. If your rules say every comment counts, that's exactly right. If your rules say one entry per person, remove the repeats before you paste.
Can I get the same draw back later?
No. Each draw in the raffle generator uses a new random seed that isn't shown or stored, so there's no way to rebuild a past result. That's deliberate: nobody, including us, can replay a draw until it lands on a favourite. Copy the results as soon as they appear.
What's the difference between Draw again and Draw one more?
Draw one more keeps the current draw and adds a single winner to the end. Draw again throws the whole result away and draws fresh, so every place can change. Use the first for a missing winner and the second only for a genuine restart.
Can I draw the grand prize last?
Yes — just decide the mapping before you press Draw. The tool numbers winners in the order they came out. If you want suspense, announce line 3 first and line 1 last. Say the plan out loud before the draw so no one thinks you picked the order after seeing names.
Does the order of my list change anyone's odds?
No. List order decides which ticket numbers each name owns, not how likely they are to win. Ana at the top with 5 tickets has the same chance as Ana at the bottom with 5 tickets. Only the count matters.
What happens if I paste a list with a typo in the ticket count?
The tool stops and names the line. A negative number, a zero, a decimal, or a count with no name before it all get a specific message, like "Line 4: tickets come in whole numbers, like 3." Nothing draws until the list reads cleanly, so a typo can't quietly hand someone the wrong odds.