Watching that video of the Michelin coupon drawing yesterday reminded me of being at O'fest 2005 for the raffle drawings. I think a total of three nights were used to draw the tickets, so I was able to observe the process. Being an old engineer, I paid particular attention to the "mixing function" that the metal drum was applying to the tickets inside. It appears that metal drum was the same or very similar to the one yesterday in the video. Yesterday it seems that it was perhaps 60% full and provided (hopefully) reasonable, random mixing when rotated. At O'fest 2005, the drum was very full of tickets. I don't recall the specifics, but watching the process each night I could see tickets around the periphery of the drum that simply stayed stuck in place when it was rotated. In other words, it wasn't capable of providing a nice, random mixing to all tickets in a reasonably equivalent manner. I would guess a drum like those used probably needs to be 1/2 full at most to randomly agitate all tickets evenly? I'm only bringing this up since that video reminded of 2005, and I had the thought of how it would be likely be "fairer" to have an electronic random selection as opposed to a sub-optimal mechanical one as I witnessed back then. Perhaps there is some other solution now in use for the master drawings, so pardon the post if so.
We have a larger drum of the car raffle and this year the tickets will be a little smaller so there is more room in the barrel when agitated. The tickets in the smaller barrel only represented tickets sold June 1-22. When tickets are placed in the barrel they are fanned out and given a good stir prior to mixing.
Wanna take of video of the process of fanning out the tickets and placing them in a barrel? I vote that there is a live stream of the tickets and the barrel and the fanning and .... I vote we go with the idea of "fanning" them all out in pen somewhere and turn a chicken loose, the first one to get, ahem, soiled, will be the winner.
Live streaming is very expensive to do it right. We looked into it a few years ago. A live chicken truck passes me on the way to work on a regular basis.
