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The 1969 draft lottery, its results, and the availability of the date-to-number table from various sources.
The 1969 draft lottery assigned each calendar birth date (including Feb. 29) a lottery number by drawing 366 capsules from a jar on December 1, 1969; the order drawn became the order of induction for ...
The 1969 draft lottery assigned disproportionately low (i.e., early-call) numbers to birthdates late in the calendar year — especially November and December birthdays — producing a visible clustering ...
The 1969 draft lottery replaced the prior age-based system with a randomized drawing of birthdays to determine the order of induction for men born 1944–1950, a change meant to make conscription fairer...
The Selective Service operated a multi-tier classification system during the Vietnam War that sorted registrants into categories ranging from "available for military service" to legally exempt or defe...
was administered by the Selective Service through a system of classifications that determined who was "available" for induction and who could delay service via deferments such as student, occupational...
College and occupational deferments during the Vietnam era materially reshaped who went to war by providing legal, administrable routes out of the draft that were far more accessible to men with resou...
The 1969 draft lottery replaced the old "oldest-man-first" conscription rule with a randomized, birth‑date lottery that determined the order of call for men born between January 1, 1944 and December 3...
The Selective Service replaced the “oldest-first” call-up with a birthdate lottery beginning December 1, 1969, using 366 capsules drawn from a drum to assign order numbers; the 1969 drawing was later ...
The December 1, 1969 draft lottery converted a previously age‑based system into a public, birth‑date‑based random selection process, pairing every day of the year with a sequence number drawn from cap...
The draft lottery drew litigation and judicial attention, but high-profile efforts to overturn or redo the initial 1969 drawing were rejected by judges; critics instead pursued political and administr...
The complete date-to-number table is available online from multiple primary and secondary sources, most authoritatively on page, with accessible reproductions and datasets hosted by archival and data ...
The assigned specific lottery numbers to each calendar birthdate; the single highest lottery number fell on June 8, 1969, while the first-drawn, and therefore riskiest, date was September 14 (lottery ...
produced a result widely criticized as non-random: later-calendar birthdays were drawn disproportionately early, increasing the chance those men would be called to serve, a pattern statisticians trace...
The December 1969 draft lottery replaced a system critics called biased toward the poor and uneducated with a calendar‑date random draw intended to equalize induction risk; roughly 850,000 men were pl...
Formal changes to draft deferment policy during the Vietnam era came from a mix of congressional amendments to the Selective Service laws and administrative directives by the Selective Service System ...
The 1969 draft lottery replaced a locally-driven, age-based induction system with a national, birthdate-based lottery that randomly ordered men born 1944–1950 for call-up, thereby changing who faced i...
The December 1, 1969 Selective Service draft lottery assigned a unique draft number (1–366) to each calendar date; the first date drawn, September 14, was assigned number 1 and the draws continued unt...