Keating Holland
WASHINGT0N (CNN) -- Warren Mitofsky, considered by many to be the "father of exit polling," died of heart failure in New York Friday. He was 72.
Mitofsky changed the way the media covers elections by pioneering the use of exit polls to project winners in U.S. elections beginning in the 1960s. He also developed many of the telephone polling techniques still in use today.
Mitofsky worked for CBS News for nearly three decades before leaving in 1990 to head Voter Research and Surveys, the first network exit poll consortium.
When Mitofsky joined CBS in the 1960s, political pollsters relied on house-to-house interviews to project winners of elections in the coming days.
Mitofsky developed the technique of canvassing people soon after they voted into a staple of modern news coverage, changing the way elections were covered and "called" by network news.
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