CBS Exit Poll Pioneer Dies

Warren Mitofsky, a pioneer in exit polling, a giant in the field of survey research and the former Executive Director of the CBS News Election and Survey Unit, died Friday in New York City of an aortic aneurysm. He was 71.

Mitofsky made seminal innovations in polling methods including the first exit poll used to measure the opinions of voters as they left the polling place that was initially only for CBS News, but the methodology was later adopted by all major news organizations. Also while Executive Producer of election night broadcasts at CBS News he started the CBS News polls in 1969.
One of the most active figures in exit polling up until the time of his passing, he was most recently conducting exit polls for a consortium of U.S. television networks, and internationally as well. He served in leadership positions of the nation's major professional polling organizations, which awarded him their highest lifetime honors.

From 1967 to 1990, Mitofsky was Executive Director of the CBS News Election and Survey Unit, and was an executive producer of its election night broadcasts. He developed and conducted the first exit polls for CBS in 1967, and he also developed the projection and analysis system used successfully by CBS and Voter News Service.

Today, the methods behind the exit polls that give voice to America's voters, and the mathematical models that help estimate election results, are in large part the result of his ingenuity and creativity. As Dan Rather once told the nation, as a heated election night's results poured in, "I believe in God, Country, and Warren Mitofsky."

Mitofsky started the CBS News/New York Times Poll in 1975 as a joint venture between the two news organizations, and directed it for CBS for its first 15 years. Kathleen A. Frankovic, his successor as Director of Surveys at CBS News, said yesterday that he was "distinguished for bringing good scientific methods to media gathering of election and opinion data."

Mitofsky's demand for the highest standards in those methods was legendary. Murray Edelman, Mitofsky's colleague at CBS News from 1967-1992, said "people in the field knew Warren for his creativity, his dedication, and his passion … and they have the scars to prove it."

Mitofsky started and directed Voter Research & Surveys from 1990 to 1993, which was the election consortium of the four major television networks, ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC, created to reduce the costs of conducting separate, competing election day exit polls. He later founded his own company, Mitofsky International, conducting research worldwide from Russia to Mexico to many other nations and including, most recently, exit polling in Mexico's 2006 presidential election, accurately showing the race to be as tight as it was.

Mitofsky was active in polling and in playing a leadership role in major polling organizations throughout his life and up until his death. He was President of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) — who also awarded him its lifetime achievement award in 1999, hailing his "continuing concern for survey quality" – and the National Council on Public Polls (NCPP). He was also President of AAPOR's New York Chapter (which also granted him its outstanding achievement award in 2002); a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and served on the boards of the Roper Center and the NY State Committee on Open Government.

Another past president of AAPOR, Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, yesterday told The New York Times that Mr. Mitofsky, "set the standard for national news polls. He was very serious about what he did. He always pushed very hard for maintaining standards."

Mitofsky came to CBS News in 1967 from the Census Bureau where he had designed many surveys during the early days of the poverty program and for presidential commissions including those investigating the selective service system and the Watts riots.

Mitofsky brought a lasting, path-breaking technical advance to the field of survey research when, along with Joseph Waksberg, the two developed a new random-digit dialing telephone sampling method, which was widely adopted by researchers. The method allowed researchers to more efficiently and accurately produce representative national samples for polls.

For all his individual achievements, Mitofsky always sought to build outstanding teams of researchers. In his address to NYAAPOR in 2002, he emphasized that survey research was "an eclectic field" demanding many kinds of expertise, and that in turn demanded that many diverse experts be involved. "No one person I know possess all the various skills at a high enough level necessary to conduct a survey. It takes a team of people to encompass all the areas."