"Pick one" three times is not "pick three"
This is the distinction the whole tool is built around, and nearly every picker on the internet lets you walk straight past it.
Pressing the button again puts the name back in the hat first. That is drawing with replacement, and the same person can come up twice. On a list of ten, three presses will hand you a repeat about a quarter of the time.
Asking for three winners draws without replacement: three different people, every time.
Both are correct answers to different questions. The trouble is that the failure is public. You find out you asked the wrong one when the same name comes up in front of everybody, and at that point no amount of explaining helps.
Which one do you want?
Prizes, raffles, secret santa, splitting a rota: different names every time. That is the default here.
Who goes next, who makes the tea, which task to start with: put them back. There is no reason the same person cannot come up on Tuesday and again on Thursday, and forcing distinctness would quietly stop being random.
Duplicates are usually deliberate
If a name appears twice, most tools silently collapse it or silently keep it, and neither tells you which.
This one keeps them and says so, because a duplicate is often the point: somebody who bought three raffle tickets should be in the hat three times and should be three times as likely to win. That is the correct behaviour for a raffle and the wrong behaviour for a class list, so it is a decision rather than a default, with a switch either way.
You can check it rather than trust it
Every picker claims to be random. Almost none of them let you look.
Draw a million times here and the page shows how often each name came up, how often it should have, and how much variation is normal for that many draws. If somebody is in the list twice it expects them to win twice as often, and does not report that as a fault.
The seed is what turns a result into a demonstration
Every draw is seeded and the seed is printed with the winners. The same seed and the same list always give the same answer.
When something is worth winning, somebody eventually asks. Being able to run the draw again in front of them, and have it land the same way, is worth more than any assurance about the algorithm.
The honest limit: this is a pseudorandom generator, which is right for a classroom, a team pick or a raffle at work. Where somebody has a serious financial incentive to predict the outcome, it is not the right tool, and it does not pretend to be.
Common questions
Is pressing "pick one" three times the same as drawing three?
No, and almost every picker on the internet lets you confuse them. Pressing the button again puts the name back first, so the same person can come up twice. Asking for three winners draws three different people. On a list of ten, pressing pick-one three times gives you a repeat about a quarter of the time, and everybody in the room notices when it happens.
Which one do I want?
For prizes, different names every time, which is the default here. For "who goes next" or "who is buying the tea", putting them back is right, because there is no reason the same person cannot be picked twice on different days. The tool tells you in words which one it is doing.
Why is there a wheel as well as this?
Same draw, different job. A wheel is for a handful of names you want to watch spin in front of people. This is for the two hundred rows somebody pasted out of a spreadsheet, where a wheel would be unreadable and what you want is the answer rather than the theatre.
What happens to duplicate names?
They are kept, because a repeated name is often deliberate: somebody who bought three raffle tickets should be in three times and should be three times as likely to win. The page tells you when it spots duplicates so you can decide, and there is a switch to collapse them if it was a copy and paste accident.
How do I know it is fair?
Press the million button. It draws one name a million times and shows how often each came up next to how often it should have, plus how much wobble to expect from chance. If a name appears twice in your list it will correctly expect that name to win twice as often, rather than calling it unfair.
Can I prove the draw afterwards?
Yes. Every draw is seeded and the seed is shown with the result. The same seed and the same list always produce the same winners, so if anybody questions it you can reproduce it in front of them instead of asking to be believed.
Is the list uploaded anywhere?
No. It never leaves your browser, there is no account, and nothing is stored. Close the tab and the list is gone.