Giveaway Winner Picker

What is the Giveaway Winner Picker?

The Giveaway Winner Picker turns a prepared list of entrants into a documented draw. It removes duplicates, applies your exclusion list, draws the winners and however many alternates you want, and produces a record you can copy, download or print — because “who won and how” is a question that always comes up afterwards.

It does not connect to any social platform. There is no comment importing, no login, no follower checking and no unofficial API. You export or copy your entrant list from wherever it lives, paste it here, and the tool does the drawing.

How to use it

1. Paste or upload your entry list. A one-column CSV or a plain text file both work.
2. Add any names that should not be eligible to the exclusion list.
3. Decide whether duplicate entries should be removed and whether matching is case sensitive.
4. Set how many winners and how many alternates you need.
5. Press “Draw winners”, then copy, download or print the draw record.

How the random selection works

After duplicates and exclusions are applied, the tool draws winners and alternates in one pass without replacement, using a partial Fisher-Yates shuffle over the eligible pool. The first N drawn are winners and the rest are alternates, in order — which means alternates are already ranked, and promoting one is simply taking the next name in the list. Every draw uses fresh entropy from crypto.getRandomValues().

The full algorithm — including the rejection-sampling step and the wheel stop-angle calculation — is written out on the methodology page.

Practical examples

• Drawing three winners and two alternates from 1,200 newsletter entries.
• Running an in-person raffle from a list of ticket numbers.
• Selecting a beta-test group from a sign-up sheet, excluding staff.
• Choosing a prize winner at a conference from the badge-scan export.
• Redrawing a prize when a winner does not respond, with the reason recorded.

Available options

• Duplicate removal with optional case-sensitive matching.
• Exclusion list for staff, previous winners or ineligible entries.
• Winners plus ranked alternates in a single draw.
• Optional weights for extra-entry campaigns, clearly labelled.
• Redraw reason field, recorded with the result.
• Copyable, downloadable and printable draw record with a full settings summary.
• Share the winner announcement, or a link to the tool. Neither carries the entrant list.

Privacy

Entrant lists frequently contain usernames or email addresses. Everything you type stays in this browser tab. There is no account, no upload step and no server-side copy of your list: the draw runs in JavaScript on your own device. Nothing is written to browser storage unless you explicitly save a list or tick the option to keep your draw history, and both can be cleared at any time from the privacy page. If you keep a draw record, keep it somewhere appropriate for personal data — a printout on a desk is still a record of your entrants.

Full details are in the privacy policy, which also has a button that deletes everything this site has stored in your browser.

Fairness and limitations

Every eligible entry has the same chance unless you deliberately apply weights, in which case the record notes that the draw was weighted. The important limit is what the tool does not check: it does not verify that entrants met your entry requirements, that they are old enough, that they live in an eligible territory, or that your promotion complies with local law and platform rules. That verification is the organiser’s job, before the list ever reaches this page.