Random Name Picker

Drawing more than one winner

Set the count above one and you get a ranked list rather than a single name. Draws are without repeats, so the same person cannot come out twice - which is what you want for prizes, and what a naive random picker often gets wrong by drawing independently each time.

The order is the draw order. First name out is first place, and if you need runners-up in case a winner does not claim, they are already ranked for you.

Running a giveaway people will believe

The problem with picking a winner is never the randomness. It is that the audience only sees the announcement, and has no way of knowing whether you drew once or drew fifteen times until a name you recognised came up.

Every draw here produces a receipt: a link containing the full entrant list, the seed, and the result. Post it with the announcement and anyone can re-run the draw themselves and get the same winner. If you had re-drawn, the hash shown before the draw would not match.

What the receipt cannot do is prove your entrant list was complete or that every name on it was a real person. That part is still on you, and any tool claiming otherwise is overselling. The mechanics are set out in full here.

Pasting a long list

The box takes one name per line, so you can copy a column out of a spreadsheet and paste it straight in. Blank lines are ignored. If your list has duplicates - the same person entered twice - they will each get their own chance, so deduplicate first unless multiple entries are meant to improve the odds.

In a classroom

Cold-calling from a picker is fairer than picking from raised hands, and pupils can see it is fair, which changes how it lands. If you want nobody chosen twice before everyone has had a turn, draw the whole class at once rather than drawing one at a time - that gives you a full random order with no repeats.

To split the same list into groups instead, use the team generator.