Drawing the winning ticket

Text: an original contemporary club-report-style practice extract.

The club’s equipment raffle used a simple rule: every paid ticket went into the same drum. At the draw, the organiser shook it vigorously and invited a visitor to pull out a ticket. Nobody could reasonably accuse that hand of knowing which name it would find.

Before the draw, however, members had been allowed to buy as many tickets as they wished. One had bought thirty; another had bought one. The single-ticket buyer had contributed hours to repairing the equipment being raffled. That work did not appear in the drum. We had made the final selection equal between tickets, then spoken as though we had made the chances equal between people.

The raffle raised useful money, and the winner had broken no rule. Those facts did not answer the question the committee needed to ask before holding another one. If the aim was fundraising, we should say so. If it was to give every member a similar chance, the tickets needed a different arrangement. A fair draw could not, by itself, choose between those aims for us.

In this extract, the writer tries to show that fairness depends on more than applying one rule equally.

Evaluate how successfully this is achieved. Support your views with detailed reference to the extract.