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 more than a dozen languages, from Spanish and Vietnamese to Arabic and Chinese. 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
Set up your lottery
Add your schools, grades, and seat counts, set the priorities you honor, and schedule the draw. Intake opens when you say so.
- 2
Families apply
A short public form in the family's own language, with no account to create. Priority claims and grade placements queue up for your review.
- 3
Draw, and let offers flow
One click locks the entries and draws with public randomness anyone can verify. Offers, acceptances, and the waitlist cascade handle themselves.
Ditch the old way
Most districts make do with tools that weren't built for lotteries, or an expensive enterprise platform. Here's what both leave on the table.
Google Forms
Collects applications, then stops. No draw, no offers, no waitlist, no proof. 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
A number with no proof, no record, and no sense of your priorities, 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
Manual sorting, copy-paste mistakes, and a tangle of versions, with no audit trail when a parent asks how a seat was assigned.
Sorteo automates ranking, offers, and the waitlist cascade, and logs every step for you.
Enterprise enrollment platforms
Run the same celebrated algorithm as a black box and ask you to trust it. The price is hidden behind a sales call for a reason: it's painful, and so is the setup.
Sorteo publishes every ranking, every cutoff, and the randomness behind them, so anyone can check the match instead of taking your word for it. And it's free during early access.
The gold-standard, Nobel Prize-winning algorithm — delivered with total transparency
When families rank schools, a fair draw takes more than a coin flip. Sorteo uses deferred acceptance: the Nobel Prize-winning Gale-Shapley algorithm trusted for unified enrollment in New York City and Denver.
Rank schools honestly
Families list schools in their true order. A long-shot first never costs a child a seat lower on their list. Honesty is the best strategy.
Receive the best offer
Each child gets the highest-ranked school their lottery number can earn. If a higher choice opens up later, they can trade up without risking the seat they hold.
Keep your place in line
No child loses a seat to weaker priority and a worse lottery number. Every ranking and cutoff is published: checkable, not a promise.
When your lottery runs, this is what your families can check
This isn't a mockup. It's the actual results page of a verified draw: every entry by its code, every school's ranking, and the public randomness that produced them.
Offers still arrive personally: an email in the family's language, with a private link to accept or decline. And every receipt carries a private entry code, so any family can pull up this page, find their line, and see exactly why. No one is left second-guessing, and no one has to take anyone's word for it.
What about pulling names from a drum?
A draw from a drum earns trust because families watch the randomness happen. There's 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 with 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.
Built by an ed-tech leader and parent who lived the problem
Sorteo's founder has spent his career building software that has helped thousands of school districts around the world. As a parent on the other side of one lottery mishap after another, he still couldn't tell whether his own kids' draws had been run right.
So Sorteo is held to a parent's test: would a family with no inside access accept this result?
Ready to run a fair, automated lottery without the headaches?
Create your district account and set up your first lottery in minutes.
Create your school lottery