A local lottery near me uses a large drum to hold the tickets. I wonder how effective the mixing of the tickets is by just rotating the drum a few times? The tickets are dropped in through a single centered slot. I have no idea how many times it gets spun before the drawing. I link to a video of a drawing a few years ago. This is a Queen of Hearts lottery so it goes on for up to 54 drawings until a winner is drawn. In the video it was down to only two possible numbers for nearly $5 million so there were many tickets. A typical bi-weekly drawing has maybe a tenth of the number of tickets compared to this one, usually 30,000 or so.
I would love to see a practice run with red tickets in one end, blue in the other and white in the middle.
Mixing is shown at -23:23. The drawing is at -15:20.
The only time I was involved in something like this - every so often the drum was stirred (by hand, no sleeves) several times as well as being rotated. The question is - how full? Doesn’t look too full, so there should be some decent stirring, but nothing moves the ends to the center?
If I were running the thing, the short guy would have a longer scepter with more of a paddle topper, and every so often they’d stop rotating, open the hatch and he’d stir the ends into the middle or something.
But logically, they dump your ticket in, it goes into the middle until the pile too high. Then the top flows outward. I hope they spin it regularly as the tickets accumulate. Spinning slow enough so it tumbles, like your dryer, does have a randomizing effect.
Then there’s the question of how they find the winner - do they dig right in or take from the top?