Way Above Board

Mary Sullivan from East Vancouver won
 Judy's red raffle quilt, and immediately put it to good use.

We sold 37 raffle tickets for Judy's red quilt, netting $925 for the library building fund, and presenting us with about 37 conflicts of interest.  We know most of the people who bought tickets, and wanted them all to win.  As it turned out,  the winner was someone we had not met before, Mary Sullivan from East Vancouver.  She came down to the Point for the recorder concert at Trinity Lutheran Church, and bought her raffle ticket there on the last day tickets were sold.  Good concert, good karma ...

So how did we avoid any bias (or even appearance of bias) in drawing the winning ticket?  Good question.   Answer: high technology and scrupulous monitoring.  We used the statistical program Stata to generate random numbers, and sorted the ticket numbers (1 through 40) into the corresponding random order. 

The program output is in the box on the right.  If you are masochistically curious about how close you came to winning, check the middle column for your ticket number; the nearer the top, the closer you were

.

To monitor the drawing, we brought in two people of the very highest integrity, who (fortunately) had not bought any raffle tickets themselves.  They are pictured on the left, just after the single computer run that created the list.  "No hanky panky here," they attest.

-- Ed Park, for the Friends of the Point Roberts Library