Which birth dates in the 1969 draft lottery received the lowest (most dangerous) numbers, and how clustered were they statistically?

1. What “lowest” numbers mean in the 1969 lottery and who was actually called

The lottery ranked all 366 possible birthdates and the earliest ranks (lowest numbers) meant a higher likelihood of induction — in practice the Selective Service called all registrants assigned lottery numbers up through 195 for 1970, so those with numbers 1–195 faced real risk of being drafted that year ^{[5] [6]}. The drawing procedure itself placed one capsule per date into a jar and drew them sequentially; the first date drawn, September 14, was assigned lottery number 1 ^{[1] [7]}.

2. Which dates ended up worst off: late-year birthdays

Multiple contemporary and retrospective accounts agree that births near the end of the year fared worst: averages and visual charts from statisticians and news reporting showed that November and December birthdays (calendar positions roughly 306–366) clustered toward low lottery numbers, meaning a higher share of those dates were drawn early ^{[1] [2]}. Sources note this pattern both in the immediate controversy and in later datasets assembled for analysis ^{[4] [6]}.

3. How clustered was the distribution — what the statistics show

Quantitative re-examinations treat the lottery as a random permutation and measure deviation from uniformity; one published Monte Carlo-style analysis found that out of 100,000 simulated random lotteries, only about 1,177 trials (≈1.2%) had a total absolute deviation at least as large as the 1969 result, implying the observed clustering was unlikely under ideal random mixing ^[3]. Statistical reviews collected at the time and later papers catalog the same conclusion: the 1969 procedure produced systematic departures from uniformity that statisticians condemned and that prompted procedural fixes in subsequent lotteries ^{[4] [8]}.

4. Mechanism suspected to create the bias

Observers and statisticians pointed to the physical handling of the date capsules — inadequate mixing and the order in which capsule packets were prepared — as the plausible mechanism that concentrated late-year dates near the top of the container, making them more likely to be drawn early ^{[2] [8]}. Contemporary press and later methodological critiques describe the process as a ball-and-urn experiment that, when poorly mixed, leads to the very month-by-month skew observed ^{[6] [4]}.

5. Counterpoints, official response, and what changed afterward

The Selective Service and some officials defended the procedure at the time, and courts rejected challenges to redoing the lottery despite statistical evidence of nonrandomness ^[9]. The agency altered its methods in subsequent lotteries (1970–1972) using better randomization and formal permutation procedures, and later lotteries are generally judged by statisticians to have been effectively random ^{[1] [4] [5]}.

6. Limitations of available reporting and what cannot be asserted

Public sources compiled the full mapping of dates to numbers, and summaries identify the late-year clustering and the first-drawn examples (e.g., September 14 = 1), but a day-by-day list of “the absolute worst N dates” tied to induction outcomes depends on choosing a cutoff (e.g., 1–195 called) and on birth-year cohorts; the sources supplied analysis and probability assessments rather than a single canonical ranked list in this summary ^{[6] [3]}. Where more granular ranking or raw-data reanalysis is required, the published datasets cited here would be the primary records to consult ^{[6] [4]}.