Statisticians Charge Draft Lottery Was Not Random (1970)

nytimes.com

4 pointsmikpanko4 comments

Shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that the lottery was mismanaged. Everything else about the Vietnam war was either mismanaged or was a lie, probably both.

TL;DR: The draft process for WWII in America involved writing dates on slips of paper and putting them into "capsules". The capsules were supposed to be randomly drawn and the order the dates were drawn determined the order men were drafted based on their date of birth. It appears, however, that the capsules were not mixed enough and so dates earlier in the year came up sooner in the draw.

Given that the article says this, part way in:

> There were 366 numbers drawn because men born in 1944 and 1948 were affected by the lottery, and those years were leap years.

This was not for the WWII draft (1944 is just before the end of WWII, and 1948 is after WWII ended). Given the publication date of 1970 this most likely was the Vietnam War draft that is being discussed.

Oh yes, my mistake.

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