The first capsule was drawn by Congressman Alexander Pirnie (R-NY) of the House Armed Services Committee:
Photo: Selective Service System
The problem with the 1970 draft (actually held in December 1969) was discovered almost immediately. On January 4, 1970, the New York Times ran a long article, "Statisticians Charge Draft Lottery Was Not Random," illustrated with a bar chart of the monthly averages, as shown here:
Part of the New York Times article is printed below.
A paper about this problem was published by S. Fienberg (1971) "Randomization and Social Affairs: The 1970 Draft Lottery", Science, January 22, 1971, Vol 171, No. 3968, p255-261
Following this discovery, the 1971 draft used a random number generator (computer), and there is no evidence of any problems with that draft.
How did the nonrandomness of the draft effect the casualties (deaths) during the Vietnam war? This was recently studied by Paul Sommers in "The Writing on the Wall", Chance, Vol, 1, 2003, p35-38. He examined the names of the casualties on the Vietnam Memorial (available online at thewall-usa.com) together with other sources and found the number of casualties by birth month:
Clearly men born late in the year had ahigher casualty rate than men born early in the year.
Question: does any of this actually matter?
Statisticians charge draft lottery was not random.
The New York Times, 4 Jan. 1970, A66
David E. Rosenbaum
The new draft lottery is being challenged by statisticians and politicians who claim that the drawings for the lottery are not random. A federal district judge in Wisconsin has agree to hear a test case on the lottery. It comes at a time when hundreds of thousands of men have been assigned a place in the draft sequence and the first men are about to be inducted using the new lottery.
President Richard Nixon signed Nov.26 an executive order to "establish a random selection sequence" for induction. The order stipulated that the lottery would be based on birthdays but did not say how the dates should be chosen.
After a staff meeting it was decided that the 366 dates of a year should be placed in capsules and then be drawn one by one from a large bowl. A man's draft number would then correspond to the order in which his birthday was drawn. For example Sept.14 was the first date drawn and June 8 was the last number drawn. Thus a man with birthday Sept.4 would have draft number 1 and someone born June 8 would have draft number 366. Pentagon manpower specialists believe that those in the last third of the numbers (200 to 366) would escape the draft entirely.
A knowledgeable White House official said this week that "discussions that the lottery was not random are purely speculative." He added that there was no possibility of another drawing.
Senator Edward Kennedy asked the National Sciences last month to analyze the "apparent lack of randomness" in the selection. The Academy has not yet decided whether to do this or not.
The challenge to the randomness is being brought by Mr.Stodosky, a 24 year-old doctorate student in computer planning. The challenge is based on the average numbers for the men in the lottery for each month. If the system were random, each month could be expected to average around 183 or 184. Each of the first six months average above this and each of the last six months average below it. Statisticians, who have studied the lottery, say that this could occur if the capsules with later months were not mixed as thoroughly as those with early months.
Two graduate students at the University of Wisconsin have estimated that the odds against obtaining the results of the drawings by a truly random process are 50,000 to 1. Other statisticians arrived at similar results.