Warren Mitofsky

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Warren Mitofsky (September 17, 1934 - September 1, 2006) was a well-regarded American pollster.

He founded a survey research company, Mitofsky International, in 1993, which conducts national election polls. Mitofsky International was the only firm to conduct polls for the Russian presidential elections in 1996 and 2000. Mitofsky also directed various consortiums conducting exit polls for U.S. federal elections between 1990 and 2004.

Mitofsky graduated in 1957 from Guilford College and was executive director of the CBS News election and survey unit from 1967 to 1990. He also previously served as an executive producer of CBS election night broadcasts. Prior to CBS, Mitofsky worked with the Census Bureau where he designed a number of surveys. Along with Joseph Waksberg, Mitofsky is credited with developing an efficient method of sampling telephone numbers using random digit dialing, which has since been widely adopted as a sampling method. In 1999, the American Association for Public Opinion Research presented him with its lifetime achievement award for his "continuing concern for survey quality".

In November 2004, Mitofsky was interviewed by PBS NewsHour regarding what went wrong with the accuracy of his exit polls for the 2004 U.S. presidential election. Early poll results were leaked which showed John Kerry leading George W. Bush, conflicting with the final official outcome. Mitofsky said he suspected that the difference arose because "the Kerry voters were more anxious to participate in our exit polls than the Bush voters." He refused, consistently, to release precinct-level polling data from Ohio to researchers who maintained that the election results were fraudulent, and his own exit polls were a more accurate picture of the vote.

He died on September 1, 2006 in New York City of an aortic aneurysm, aged 71.