Probably of a raffle ticket being drawn

Question

There is a bag of approximately 100 raffle tickets. Before drawing any tickets the master of ceremonies randomly grabs a handful of tickets and disposes them.

Does that change the probability of being the winning ticket?

Answer 1

No, the act of randomly removing a handful of tickets before drawing does not change the probability of any one ticket being the winning ticket. In probability theory, if each ticket initially has an equal chance of being the winner, randomly discarding some of them does not introduce any bias or favor particular tickets. This is because the process of removing tickets is entirely random, meaning every ticket still has an equal chance of being discarded or remaining in the bag.

Once the handful of tickets is removed, the remaining tickets still form a random subset of the original set. The winning ticket is still equally likely to be among the remaining tickets, as the act of random removal does not alter the fairness of the draw. Therefore, while the total number of tickets decreases, the probability of any specific ticket being the winner remains the same as it was before the handful was discarded. The key point is that the removal was done randomly, ensuring that no ticket had a greater or lesser chance of being kept or eliminated.

I hope this helps. If you have any additional questions, please feel free to reach out. Take care!

-Dr. Christal-Joy Turner