Toolrack

Random Name Picker

Works offlineNothing is uploadedFree, no sign-up
Add ×3 after a name to give it three tickets — weighted draws for giveaways with multiple entries.

Drawn in this tab — the list never leaves it, and no draw is logged anywhere.

Paste a list of names, draw one winner or several, or shuffle the whole list — with the browser's cryptographic randomness and an unbiased draw, in your tab where nobody can rig it and nothing is logged.

Fair is a property of the algorithm

Two things make a draw fair: unpredictable randomness and equal probability. The first comes from the cryptographic generator every modern browser ships. The second is where casual implementations fail — random() times length, floored, is fine, but modulo on raw integers is not, and shuffling by sorting on random comparisons is measurably biased.

This page shuffles with Fisher–Yates, the one algorithm that provably produces every ordering with equal probability, and draws winners as the first k of a shuffle — which is why drawing three winners never produces a duplicate.

Frequently asked questions

How is the winner actually chosen?

With crypto.getRandomValues — the browser's cryptographic generator — and rejection sampling, so every index is exactly equally likely. That second part matters: the naive modulo trick makes low indices slightly more probable, which is a real bias in a giveaway.

Can a draw be rigged or predicted?

Not from outside: the randomness comes from the operating system's entropy pool, nothing is seeded from time, and the page neither stores nor transmits results. The one thing the tool cannot vouch for is the list itself — a name pasted twice is two tickets.

Why not the spinning-wheel sites?

Most run ad trackers next to your participant list, some let the operator quietly weight entries, and the wheel animation is theatre either way. If you need the theatre, spin this tool's result afterwards — the fairness lives in the draw, not in the spinning.

How do I run a draw people can verify?

Publish the list, its order and the count before drawing, then draw in front of the audience — screen-share the tab. For fully auditable draws (lotteries with stakes), you need a committed seed scheme; for office giveaways, transparency of the list plus a live draw is the honest standard.

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