Before the presidential election of 1988, only five polls were published, and no exit poll or quick count was done. In the 2006 presidential election, between January and June, just over one hundred polls were published, and eight exit polls and quick counts were released on election night by nine different media, conducted by a dozen different polling firms. Half of these firms had, in some way or another links with Warren Mitofsky, and all of them knew him at least somewhat. Warren became an indispensable point of reference for good, honest, independent polling in Mexico.

I think the best testimony of Warren’s legacy in Mexico is the overall quality of the Mexican polls. In Table 1, three estimates are shown of the differences between the last polls taken prior to elections and the actual vote in Mexico. M1 is the “error” in the winner, M2 is the average error in the three major candidates, and M3 is the error in the margin between first and second. Pollsters are identified with letters only, because in all cases the means for first and second place are within the margin of error, and hence all estimates are basically the same.

Table 2 shows the average of M2 for different elections in Mexico and the United States. As can be noticed, the average error seems to be larger than that in the United States. This larger error does not stem from any difference in methodology. It is the result of the forced silence imposed on Mexican pollsters by the electoral laws. In Mexico it is forbidden to publish poll results eight days before the election, and the last poll has to be taken almost two weeks before, since, with telephone coverage limited to middle- and upper-class Mexicans, all polls have to be conducted face to face. The important point, however, is the improvement in accuracy of the Mexican polls over time.

Warren was generous and open, and many of us interacted with him to different degrees about every aspect of polling. I will never forget the hundred times he took a pencil and explained to me or my collaborators this or that methodological point. But the most important advice I received from him was not about sampling or estimation. Many times he mentioned how much it surprised him that people asked about those things, while never mentioning the most important aspect of good exit polling: quality control of the information. I do not know what Warren taught other pollsters. What I do know is that he did not teach us how to do exit polls; he did more, much more than that. He trusted us, and set very high the ethical standards for the Mexican polling industry he helped develop. Above all, Warren was an integral participant in the construction of a reliable electoral system, and, therefore, a better democracy.

It would be unfair to Warren to finish this account on such a solemn note. At Warren’s funeral, Kathy Frankovic, director of polling at CBS, read a beautiful piece in which she described a WAPOR seminar in Mexico she and Warren had participated in. She described how she could hear “Mitofsky” whispered like a kind of prayer. I have to make a small correction. Mindful of the very many problems he had helped us solve in Mexico, we were only trying to figure out the most difficult one Warren had put to us: Where should we take him for lunch?

Ulises Beltrán is general director of BGC, Beltrán y Asociados, S.C.