What is the best low-tech protocol to simulate drawing names out of a hat and ensure secrecy?

Question

Each year at Thanksgiving, my family has drawn names out of a hat to determine who they\'ll be a \"Secret Santa\" for the Christmas gift exchange. It\'s important to our fam

Answer 1

You could have your computer dial each person via modem and use text-to-speech to announce their name over the line after an answer. It's sort of like the auto-dialer programs that political candidates and advertisers use to play you a message. Alternatively you could set it up so that your family calls your number and the computer answers. Then they push phone buttons to spell their name and the computer then tells them who they drew.

That way the names can be randomly selected by a simple program, and you don't have to see/hear who gets what names.

There is open source software that can run on linux to do this, although I have never used it. I assume there's an open source windows equivalent.

I assume your entire family has access to telephone even if they have no email.