Draw Machine Critical Review
How do we know a physical lottery machine produces uniform randomness? We don't prove it from physics — we verify it from data. Twelve independent axes, each with its own failure mode and its own statistical test.
A physical draw machine can be mathematically fair even if it is not metaphysically perfect.
The correct question is not whether the machine is "perfectly random" — nothing in the physical universe is — but whether any detectable bias is large enough to be statistically significant across thousands of draws. The 12 factors below are exactly the axes along which bias could show up, and the standard procedures for detecting it.
The 12 factors
Each factor lists the physical mechanism, the physics that governs it, and the statistical test that would detect a problem.
Mathematical vs. metaphysical fairness
A machine that is verifiably uniform within statistical resolution over 10,000+ draws is mathematically fair in every sense that matters: no strategy, pattern recognition, or "due number" reasoning can extract advantage from it. The remaining question — whether the universe is "really" random at the quantum-philosophical level — is interesting but operationally irrelevant to whether your ticket has a 1-in-139,838,160 chance.
This page describes how lottery operators verify fairness. It does not imply that any specific machine is fair — that determination requires independent statistical audit of the actual historical draws.