For school districts

Fair school lotteries, made stress-free.

Automate your entire lottery process—from fair draws to multilingual parent acceptance—without spreadsheets or frustrated families.

Free to set up. No software to install.

Everything a fair lottery needs

Provably fair draws

Every draw is seeded by a public randomness beacon and recorded in a tamper-evident transcript. Anyone can verify the result wasn't rigged — including you.

Offers and waitlists on autopilot

Seats go out automatically in lottery order. When a family declines or an offer expires, the next family is notified — no spreadsheets, no manual chasing.

Families hear from you, in their language

Offer, accept, decline, and reminder emails in English and Spanish. Parents click a secure link — no account, no password.

An auditable record, start to finish

Applications, draws, offers, and responses are all logged — defensible if a parent, or a board member, ever asks how a seat was assigned.

How it works

  1. 1

    Set up your lottery

    Add your schools, grades, and seat counts. Open intake or import applications you already have.

  2. 2

    Run the draw

    Trigger a verifiable random draw. Sorteo ranks every applicant and locks the result.

  3. 3

    Let offers flow

    Families get offers in order. Acceptances, declines, and the waitlist cascade handle themselves.

Sorteo replaces the patchwork

Most districts run a lottery by stitching together a form, an online randomizer, and a spreadsheet. Here's what each one leaves on the table.

Google Forms

Collects applications and then stops. It can't draw a winner, send offers, run a waitlist, or prove the result was fair — you export a sheet and do the hard part by hand.

Sorteo carries each application all the way to an assigned seat, automatically.

Random number generators

Spit out a number with no proof and no record — and no sense of your priority transfers, offers, or waitlist. No one can check the result afterward.

Every Sorteo draw is seeded by a public randomness beacon and saved in a transcript anyone can verify.

Spreadsheets

Mean manual sorting, copy-paste mistakes, and a tangle of versions — with no audit trail when a parent or board member asks how a seat was assigned.

Sorteo automates ranking, offers, and the waitlist cascade, and logs every step for you.

What about pulling names from a drum?

A draw from a drum earns trust because families watch the randomness happen — no black box to second-guess.

But physical draws are easy to get wrong: a name entered twice, a ping-pong ball that goes missing, slips of textured paper that won't mix. Sorteo keeps that watch-it-happen transparency — a public randomness beacon and a verifiable transcript — while making those mistakes impossible. Every entry counts exactly once, and nothing can go missing.

Even the waitlist is auditable

The transparency doesn't stop at the draw. When a family declines their spot, the seat passes to the next family in the locked lottery order — automatically. Every offer, decline, and reassignment is recorded, so the waitlist is as verifiable as the draw that created it.

A family declines their offer or misses their deadline to respond.

The next family in lottery order is automatically offered the seat via email.

Ready to run a fair, automated lottery—without headaches?

Create your district account and set up your first lottery in minutes.

Create your school lottery