Warren Mitofsky, RIP
[The public opinion community is in a paroxysm of grief over this…]
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.”