Random Name Picker
Random Name Picker is an online lottery page that runs entirely in your browser. Your list, prize tiers and draw records stay on your own device and are never uploaded to a server. Paste participants one per line, then optionally give each person a weight, assign them to a prize tier, or exclude them outright. An excluded person never enters the candidate pool in any mode, while a person with weight zero stays in the pool but can never win. The tool supports single draws, batch draws, repeatable and non-repeatable modes, tier-by-tier draws with prize slots, and a countdown reveal, all driven by the browser's cryptographically secure random source with weighted sampling. The setup, draw and history panels are separated and each can go fullscreen for a projector. Setup opens the draw panel in a new tab, and the draw panel opens history in another tab, so you cannot hit the editor by accident while presenting. The list saves itself and is still there after you close the page. A share link is lightly encrypted: it stops casual edits, but it does not promise secrecy against someone who reads the source. Everything is adapted for phone, tablet and desktop, with no sign-up and no install.
Participants
Separate with commas, Chinese commas or tabs. A third field may hold a tier name, and it joins that tier only when the name matches one below.
Nobody here yet. Paste a list first, or add one name above.
Prize tiers
Drawn in order, moving to the next tier once the slots fill.Set slots to 0 for no limit. Use the arrows to change the order.
No tiers yet. Without tiers, everyone shares a single pool.
Draw rules
0 means no limit; 1 means each person can win once.
An excluded person never enters the candidate pool in any mode or tier. That is a hard rule.
Saves the current list first, then opens the live draw panel in a new tab so presenting cannot touch the editor.
How to use
- Paste participants into the list, one per line; you may also write name,weight.
- Create prize tiers if you need them, and set each tier's slots and order.
- Give a few people a weight, assign them to a tier, or exclude them.
- Click Start draw and use single, batch or countdown mode in the new tab.
- Open the history panel afterwards to review or export this round.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between excluding someone and setting their weight to zero?
Exclusion is a hard rule: the person leaves the candidate pool, the drawable count drops, and this suits someone who is absent today or has already received a prize. Weight zero is a soft rule: the person stays in the pool and still appears in the statistics, but the probability is zero and they can never win. To bring them back, simply change the weight to 1; you do not need to re-enter the name.
Are the list and records still there after I close the page or go offline?
Yes. The list, tiers, rules and the latest 2000 draw records are written to the browser's built-in IndexedDB and never sent to a server. As long as you use the same device and browser and do not clear site data, reopening the page restores the previous state. Switching devices or clearing browser data will lose it, so export an important list first.
Is the draw fair, and can it be recomputed afterwards?
Sampling uses the browser's cryptographically secure random source, and the weighting is integer prefix sums plus a binary search, so accumulated decimals cannot bias one person. The tool deliberately offers no recomputation: drawing again from the same list gives a different result, because every draw uses fresh random values. If you genuinely need reproducibility, the correct approach is to fix your own seed and publish the complete algorithm and list, not to trust a switch on a page. Reproducible only means the process can be replayed; it does not prove to everyone that the list was not swapped at the time.
Why does a shared link say it is broken or refuse to open?
The share payload is compressed and encrypted, so if a chat app truncates it, wraps it in a short link, or you edit part of it by hand, it will not decode. Copy the complete link rather than half of it. If the link exceeds 2000 characters, some platforms wrap it automatically, and sending it in numbered segments is safer. A non-https context or a very old browser without the web crypto API produces the same message.
How do I use this on a big screen, and will several tabs overwrite each other?
Both the setup panel and the draw panel have a fullscreen button that scales the stage to the screen, and you can also drag the draw tab onto the projector display. The draw panel writes each reveal to the local database immediately, and the history panel opens as an independent read-only view, so keeping both open does not overwrite the list. What you should avoid is editing the same configuration in two tabs at once: the later save wins.
What is it
Random Name Picker breaks the question of who wins into three parts you can check: a list, a set of prize tiers, and a random rule. Each person on the list can carry an independent weight, can be excluded, or can compete only in one tier. An excluded person disappears from the candidate pool completely, while a person at weight zero stays visible in the pool yet can never win. The two are deliberately different. After a win, non-repeat mode removes the person from the pool according to the scope you chose, until the prize slots fill up, while repeat mode keeps the pool and only enforces the per-person cap. Random values come from the browser's cryptographically secure source, and weighted sampling uses integer prefix sums with a binary search, so floating point drift cannot quietly favour one person. Every list and record lives in the browser's local database, so a refresh, a closed tab or a dropped connection does not lose it.
Origin & history
Drawing lots is far older than any lottery machine. Ancient Athens used sortition to fill many public offices, and by the fifth century BC there were dedicated machines that dropped black and white stones into a row of slots in sequence, so whichever name lined up took the office. The Romans called a similar practice sortitio and used it to allocate provinces and duties. Medieval European fairs introduced lotteries to raise funds, and the rules slowly moved from a casual grab to registration followed by a public draw. In 1969 the United States used a lottery to set the order of conscription, and statisticians later showed a clear correlation between birth dates and sequence numbers; that argument helped establish the principle that even a random process has to be tested. In 1955 the RAND Corporation published A Million Random Digits, making randomness something that could be photocopied and checked. In 1998 random.org began offering online random numbers from atmospheric noise, and around 2011 browsers gained crypto.getRandomValues, letting any page obtain cryptographically secure values locally. A modern picker compresses centuries of convention into one page: the list is fixed in advance, the rules are written in the open, and the result is kept. Technology only replaced the cardboard box with a database and changed who saw it into anyone can check it. Almost every argument about a fair draw today traces back to this line: what is usually missing is not randomness, but randomness that can be checked.
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