Check a live draw

Every live draw is sealed before it is drawn. The seal is a SHA-256 fingerprint of the draw's secret seed, its settings and the full list of names, shown on stream before anything moves. After the draw the seed is shown, so anyone can repeat the sums and see the winner was fixed by the seal - nobody could change the list or pick the winner afterwards.

How to check it by hand

  1. Take the text ["seed","settings",["name 1","name 2",...]] exactly as shown below (it is a JSON array) and put it through any SHA-256 tool. You get the seal.
  2. Work out SHA-256(seed + ":0"). Read its first 4 bytes as one number, v.
  3. With n names, the limit is floor(4294967296 / n) × n. If v is below the limit, the winner is name number (v mod n) + 1. If not, try ":1", then ":2", and so on. Throwing those away is what keeps every name's chance exactly equal.