CBS Exit Poll Pioneer Dies

Warren Mitofsky, 71, Started CBS News Polls In 1969

(CBS) 
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."