Talk:Draft lottery (1969)

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[edit] Relevance to the Vietnam War

This article seem very underexplanatory. There is no mention of the war which prompted the lottery. No mention of the politics surrounding this lottery. This may not be the appropriate article to explain these topics, but these topics are also absent from Vietnam War AND The United States and the Vietnam War.


I don't understand the significance of the scatterplot, this needs to be explained more clearly. As well, the overall article doesn't flow too well and smacks of something copied & pasted from somewhere else... 69.157.105.230 22:25, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)

What days of the year were picked as a matter of interest?


++++

There was an issue with the lack of randomness of this lottery; later dates in the year tended to get lower numbers. I suspect the scatterplot is related to this, although I can barely read it.

I'm wondering about the basis for the phrase "Conscription ended in 2004." I was under the impression that it ended in 1973, although none were even taken that year.

I don't want to edit the original because I may be missing something.

Mike Jobu 12:16, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

conscription did indeed end in '73. bush-bashing at work. he may be an idiot but I'm sick of people defacing Vietnam articles in order to abuse him... I've reverted the article. the last couple edits have also changed what the first date drawn was... going to try and do some research and see if I can find the right date. Tmorrisey 23:33, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Leap Year Birthdays

I'm certain that people born on February 29 didn't know what to think of this. Had their number been drawn, it might have resulted in a serious population decrease for those with that birthday. Captain Jackson 04:51, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] It was 366 days

If I come back here and see someone has changed it to "The days of the year, from 1 to 365, were written on slips of paper and the slips were placed in plastic capsules" I will have this article blocked from being edited by new & non-registered users. Got it?

Sure bud...

[edit] Results

Would a chart of the results of the Draft be encyclopedic? There's one on this site http://www.sss.gov/lotter1.htm. I wouldn't be able to do it myself, but I'm sure someone could.--Richy 21:13, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Which is incorrect?

The first number drawn was 258 (September 14). The highest draft ... was number 195 (September 24).

Day 195 certainly isn't September 24. Which is incorrect, 195 or September 24? --Lucent 22:33, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

It appears that this section is confusing. What it means is that they only picked 195 of the 366 possible days that year. So the first pick was day number 258, which is September 14, and the last pick was pick number 195, and they drew day number 268, which is September 24. This table of lottery results makes this clear. -- Dominus (talk) 12:28, 23 January 2008 (UTC)
That's not quite right. The table actually shows that a number was drawn for every bithdate, including Leap Day. The text says: The highest lottery number called for this group was 195; all men assigned that lottery number or any lower number, and who were classified 1-A or 1-A-O (available for military service), were called to report for possible induction. So, 195 was not the highest number called out during the draw and assigned to a birthday, it was the highest number assigned during the first draw whose holders became eligible for induction. Almost all of us at 195 or lower who were 1-A got orders to report for a physical during 1970.--Hjal (talk) 17:58, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for the clarification. I think I got it right when I edited that part of the article last week. -- Dominus (talk) 18:07, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Lottery start date.

December 1969 may have been the first ever lottery conducted at the national level. But I contend that draft lotteries were in use to some extent in 1968 if not also 1967. One way I can see this happening is if local draft boards got the ball rolling and the process then went national with the signing of a bill making it a requirement. Apart from my own recollections, I've seen two other references to pre-1969 lottery activity. I will be doing some searches for corroboration on this. - Srobidoux (talk) 08:42, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Perception of insufficient "randomness"

There should some sort of rebuttal to the notion that the displayed result was not "random" enough. Such as, it is not possible to meaningful decide if a process is random enough based on a single result; and that humans are lousy judges of randomness, deeming a result of a random shuffle such as "2143" as "more random" than "4321", even though both have the same probability of occurring. Perhaps someone with a better knowledge of probability and statistics can jump in here... Pimlottc (talk) 04:05, 26 March 2008 (UTC)