A demonstration
This wheel is rigged
It holds 100 names. Spin it as many times as you like. It will land on somebody I chose every single time, and it will never tell you that is what it is doing.
It fools the eye. It cannot touch the maths.
That is the same wheel we use on the Live. The same code draws it, the same names scroll past, it slows down in the same way and lands with the same little bounce. It even lands somewhere different each time, which is exactly what a working wheel would do. The only difference is one number, decided before the first frame, that nobody watching can see.
The confetti comes too, because of course it does. None of it has anything to do with whether the answer is honest. The 5 names it picks from are obvious on purpose; make them Jennifer and Michelle instead and you would never know.
Which is the problem. A convincing animation is not evidence. Every group doing something like this has a spinner, and a spinner can be told where to stop. So can a shuffled list, a random number generator, and a hat with folded paper in it if somebody is willing to palm one.
So we do not ask you to trust the wheel
On a real selection the wheel is the last thing that happens, and it changes nothing. The outcome is already fixed by then, by two things that happened in public before it started:
- The list is sealed. Every eligible member goes into a fixed order and we publish a fingerprint of it. Change one letter of one name and the fingerprint comes out completely different.
- The number is named before it exists. We say, in public, which future drand number we will use. Nobody on earth knows what it will be, including us, and independent timestamp authorities sign that promise.
After that the recipient is decided by arithmetic anyone can repeat. The wheel is just how we watch it happen.