New York Times - September 3, 2006
Warren J. Mitofsky, 71, Innovator Who Devised Exit Poll, Dies
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By ADAM CLYMER Published: September 4, 2006 Warren J. Mitofsky, an innovator and standard-setter in the polling industry for four decades, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 71.
E.J. Baumeister Jr. Warren J. Mitofsky, in 2001. The cause was an aneurysm of the aorta, said his wife, Mia Mather.
Kathleen A. Frankovic, his successor as director of surveys at CBS News, said on Saturday that he was “distinguished for bringing good scientific methods to media gathering of election and opinion data.”
While working at the Census Bureau in the 1960’s, Mr. Mitofsky along with a colleague, Joseph Waksberg, devised a random digit dialing system that became the standard for telephone polling for many years.
Mr. Mitofsky, who lived in Manhattan, joined CBS News in 1967. Shortly thereafter, he organized the polling of voters who had just cast their ballots — known as exit polls — in a Kentucky gubernatorial election. CBS News began using that device, initially to determine demographics and issues relating to voters in subsequent elections. He conducted the first national exit poll in 1972.
Then he worked with editors at The New York Times to create a joint polling operation for the 1976 elections, one that became the model for other rival collaborations between television networks and newspapers. The Times and CBS News wrote the questionnaires together, but each organization chose what to highlight in its own report. CBS called it, and still does, the CBS News/New York Times Poll. The Times calls it the New York Times/CBS News Poll.
Mr. Mitofsky left CBS News in 1990 to run the Voter Research Service (which was succeeded by Voter News Service), a consortium created by the television networks to reduce the costs of conducting separate, competing Election Day exit polls.
In 1993 he created Mitofsky International, a polling organization that spread exit polling to many countries, including Russia and Mexico.
The last exit poll he conducted was for the Mexican presidential election on July 2. It was done for the television network Televisa, and showed the conservative candidate, Felipe Calderón, with a tiny margin over the leftist candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador — just as the nearly final vote tallies now indicate. But in a recent interview published by the Pew Research Center, Mr. Mitofsky said, “We didn’t release the exact numbers from the exit poll; all we put on the air was that it was too close to call.”
That argument mirrored one that he has made frequently in defense of exit polls — that the flaws people find in them are really the result of premature leaks of incomplete data. He said the Mexican television executives were more responsible than the Americans had been in 2004 when they leaked polling data.
But in the Pew interview, he effectively conceded one flaw in the polling he had done for Voter News Service in 2004.
He told Pew that in Mexico “we did one thing that hopefully I learned from the 2004 election. We insisted in the personal training of the interviewers that they absolutely stick to the sampling rate,” so that if someone refused to be interviewed, the interviewer did not just question the next voter willing to be interviewed but followed the pattern, like going to every seventh voter.
Mr. Mitofsky was active in and a past president of two major polling organizations, the American Association for Public Opinion Research and the National Council on Public Polls. In 1999, the research association presented him with a lifetime achievement award, hailing “his continuing concern for survey quality.”
Another past president of the group, Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, said yesterday 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.”
Mr. Mitofsky, a native of the Bronx, graduated from Guilford College and did graduate work at the University of North Carolina and the University of Minnesota. In addition to his wife, he is survived by a sister, Lenore Levy, who lives near Buffalo; a son, Bryan Mitofsky of Montpelier, Vt.; a daughter, Elisa Clancy of Hyde Park, Vt.; and four grandchildren. His son and daughter were from his first marriage, to Dolores Kilgore, a marriage that ended in divorce, as did his second marriage, to Ronda Shaw.
A longtime CBS colleague, Martin Plissner, recalled yesterday how Mr. Mitofsky’s insistence on precision caused CBS to be two hours behind ABC and NBC in calling Jimmy Carter’s victory in the 1976 election.
About midnight, Mr. Plissner said, Mr. Carter had secured 265 electoral votes out of the 270 needed for election. “Then News Election Service, which was counting the hard votes, declared that Mr. Carter had carried Mississippi, which casts seven. That was enough for maestros at the other networks, but not for Warren.
“Warren knew that in Mississippi the electors were elected individually — not as a slate — and he wanted to make sure that Carter had won the five he needed — something NES couldn’t tell him. For two hours Warren and his minions worked the phones until they nailed down for sure the five votes needed to call it a night.”