Reply #8: There are two drums, sealed and warehoused in Washington DC [View All]

[gratuitous]

This is my understanding from Mrs. gratuitous, who finished 20 years of service on the local draft board back in 2002:

Inside each of those drums are 366 little capsules, consecutively numbered. The first drum is turned a set number of times, and one of the little capsules is taken out. The person taking out the capsule hands it to another person, who breaks it open. That person then hands it to another person, who reads off the numberon the piece of paper inside the capsule, which is verified by another person standing next to him. The paper is then held up to be acknowledged by the folks in the room, and someone standing by a large chalkboard writes that number in the first space.

The second drum is then turned, and the same process is repeated. The numbers from one drum (I forget which) correspond to the order in which men will be called up for the draft, and the numbers from the other drum correspond to the dates of the year (capsule number 125, for example, would be May 4). If you were born on May 4, 1986, then you would be called up in order of what capsule came out of the other drum when capsule 125 came out of the birth date drum. The lower the number, the sooner you would be called.

Historically, there have been all sorts of ways to defer going into the service: In the Civil War, a person could buy his way out; during Vietnam, men could secure a deferments by going to college or working in an industry that supported the war effort.

The likelihood of the draft being "rigged," that is, worked so that a particular person would get a low draft number is pretty small, and the difficulties would probably not be worth the effort. It's far easier to set up a system of deferments that wealthy folks can take advantage of but whose cost would be prohibitive for others.