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Warren Mitofsky Dies
Exit poll pioneer Warren Mitofsky has died in New York aged 71. Mitofsky used exit polls to predict voting patterns in US elections from the late 1960s, and also invented random digit dialling in partnership with Joseph Waksberg.
The first exit poll was conducted for CBS News in 1967 and covered the Kentucky governor's race. Prior to this, pollsters relied on house-to-house interviews to project election results. Mitofsky worked as Director of CBS' election unit for the next 27 years and helped found the CBS/New York Times Poll.
A former President of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), he was given its lifetime achievement award in 1999 for his 'continuing concern for survey quality'. He is also a fellow of the American Statistical Association.
He founded research company Mitofsky International in 1993, with the primary goal of conducting exit polls for news organizations in major elections around the world. In the last forty years he directed exit polls and quick counts for almost 3,000 electoral contests, and ran the first national presidential exit polls in the United States, Russia, Mexico and the Philippines. His last exit poll was for the Mexican election in July.
Mitofsky checked into hospital last Friday and died the same day of heart failure. His current projects were a book about exit polls and work on a system for the News Election Pool for use in the forthcoming midterm elections. He is survived by his wife Mia, two children and four grandchildren.
Mitofsky International is on the Web at www.Mitofskyinternational.com .
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