2025 Warren J. Mitofsky Award Winners Murray Edelman and Joe Lenski

Murray Edelman has had an important hand in the advancement of exit polling. His career began at the U.S. Census Bureau, where he worked on sampling methods — and first met Mitofsky. They soon joined forces, successfully piloting the first major exit poll for a news network — for CBS News during Kentucky’s 1967 gubernatorial race — and the first national exit poll in 1972. They worked together on every major election through 1992 in the U.S., and took their work to the Philippines and Russia. Edelman’s methodological contributions to exit polls include questionnaire design and attention to non-sampling error, weighting and non-response adjustment, and expanding the exit poll to include absentee and early voters.

He went on to serve as Editorial Director of Voter News Service, a consortium of major news organizations, where he succeeded Mitofsky in overseeing exit polling operations for a decade and projecting hundreds of races each election night. During Edelman’s second stint at CBS, he further developed methods of vote projection that combine exit polls and partial vote returns, and he remains an Election Consultant with CBS News. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago, was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Rutgers, and was inducted into Chicago’s LGBT Hall of Fame for both his activism and pioneering research on gay and lesbian voters.

Joe Lenski began working on exit polls in 1987, joining Mitofsky and Edelman at CBS directly after graduating from Princeton University with an engineering degree. Lenski conducted statistical and programming work for the first network pool known as Voter Research & Surveys, eventually becoming Mitofsky’s right-hand man in conducting surveys and projecting election outcomes on election nights.

Lenski went on to found Edison Media Research, which eventually took over the exit poll operation for the major networks. Edison Research has conducted all state and national exit polling for the National Election Pool since 2003. Lenski has overseen this work for more than 20 years, continually innovating as election rules and voting behavior have evolved. Lenski also expanded exit polling’s international reach, building on Mitofsky’s early work in Mexico and Russia. Edison has conducted exit polls in Azerbaijan, Iraq, the Republic of Georgia, and Venezuela, providing invaluable data in politically volatile settings. This work has necessitated adapting methodologies to local election laws and challenging conditions, but its contribution to democratic development is enormous, including providing evidence that official election counts have been manipulated.