What a Truly Fair Lottery Process Looks Like

Everyone loves prizes. If you want to give an "Around the World Trip" prize to one person, you could use a fun lottery machine and draw the number in front of a crowd. But if your prize is "100 iPads for 100 winners," you'll have to think of something a little more sophisticated.

You'll want to be able to tell anyone that it was a fair lottery. If you merely say you used a random draw by computer, some may still harbor doubts concerning transcription mistakes or a few dishonestly pulled strings behind closed doors. If possible, we'd want a process that has a low possibility of internal cheating, and also prevents mistakes and redo's.