Local 10 eARTday Art Contest: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes in the eARTday contest and why it matters

The Local 10 eARTday Art Contest is a community ballot before it is anything else: the voters are WPLG Local 10 viewers across the Miami, Florida market, and the people they are voting for are students. The station invites all art teachers and students, from grades Pre-K to 12, to participate, which makes this one of the few public-vote programs in South Florida where the entire field is school-age artists and the audience is the station's general news audience rather than a niche of category insiders.

That shape decides how support actually works. A student cannot campaign to a panel of judges, because there is no panel; the piece that wins is the one whose teacher, family, classmates and neighborhood show up repeatedly during the voting window. Since the station counts one vote per valid and active IP address per day, the contest rewards organized daily participation over a single burst of attention. A classroom that reminds thirty households to return every day outperforms a viral moment that lasts an afternoon.

For viewers, the appeal is direct. The ballot runs on local10.com itself, at the station's contests topic page, local10.com/topic/Contests/, next to the station's other giveaways and promotions, and the winning artwork is celebrated on air. The 2025 cycle was billed as the 8th Annual eARTh Day Art Contest, tying the student art theme to Earth Day itself.

The dated timeline for the eARTday ballot

The confirmed history for this program spans three edition years: 2024, 2025 and 2026, all anchored to the station's contests topic page. The 2025 cycle is the best-documented of the three because WPLG published its full schedule. Student entries and registration forms were accepted online from February 3, 2025 until 11:59 p.m. on March 9, 2025. Voting then ran from March 17 through April 6 at 11:59 p.m., and the station stated that Local 10 viewers could vote for their favorite work of art throughout that span.

The 2025 edition carried a specific on-air milestone: the winner was announced on WPLG, Inc., Local 10 News on April 22, 2025, which is Earth Day itself and fits the contest's theme. The same cycle was promoted as the station's 8th Annual eARTh Day Art Contest, a count the station applied to its own series even though the confirmed edition list on the contests page reaches back only to 2024.

What the contests page does not print is the breakdown of the ballot itself. Local 10 has not published the list of artwork categories or grade groupings that appear on the eARTday ballot; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The station likewise does not restate its full eligibility fine print on the topic page, so teachers planning an entry should read the current cycle's contest terms rather than assuming the 2025 schedule repeats. The 2026 edition is confirmed as having run, and the program's annual pattern points to a 2027 edition.

How a supporter votes on the eARTday ballot today

Voting happens on the organizer's own site, not on a third-party platform. A supporter starts at the contests topic page on local10.com, where WPLG lists its live promotions, and follows the eARTh Day Art Contest link into the current artwork gallery. Each accepted student piece is displayed there, and the vote control sits with the artwork itself.

The station's stated limit is the rule that shapes everything: one vote per valid and active IP address per day. A household on a single connection casts a single daily vote, so a family that wants to back a student's piece throughout the window builds a habit of returning each evening or morning. The limit also means the contest cannot be swung by one person clicking repeatedly on the same connection; the station's system simply stops counting that address for the day.

Timing matters as much as volume. The 2025 voting window ran March 17 through April 6, closing at 11:59 p.m. that final evening; votes cast after a window closes do not carry into the next cycle. Because each edition gets a fresh gallery and fresh dates on the contests page, the safest routine is to open the current ballot, confirm the close date printed there, and plan daily returns up to that evening. No account step is described in the station's vote rule, which is tied to IP addresses rather than logins, though the site itself offers separate registration for news alerts.

How the eARTday ballot sits among Florida vote programs

Within this site's Florida coverage, the eARTday contest is the odd one out in a useful way. Its five siblings are all business and reader-choice ballots: the Best of Florida Awards, the Best of Miami Readers' Poll, Best of Orlando, Best of Tallahassee, Best of the Bay and Best in Destin. Those programs ask consumers to pick favorite businesses across a market. The eARTday ballot asks the same Miami-area audience to pick favorite student artwork instead, which changes who campaigns and how.

It also differs in its host. The siblings are reader polls run by publishers across the state, while the eARTday contest lives on WPLG's own local10.com domain under the station's contests hub. That gives it a broadcast amplifier none of the reader polls have: the winner is announced on Local 10 News, as happened on April 22, 2025, and the station promotes the contest to its entire viewing area rather than to a publication's subscriber base.

The market overlap still matters. Miami voters who follow the Best of Miami Readers' Poll are the same households a student's family reaches with an eARTday ask, and the daily-return habit transfers between the two. What does not transfer is the rule set: the station's one-vote-per-IP-per-day limit is its own, and each sibling program answers to its own publisher's terms.

Strengthening support within the station's rules

The honest way to build votes here is organizational, not technical. The station's own rule, one vote per valid and active IP address per day, means a student's strongest asset is a list of distinct households willing to return daily. Teachers are the natural organizers, since the contest invites them directly: a note home that asks each family to vote from its own connection every evening through April 6 does more than any single-day push. Sharing the gallery link directly, rather than making supporters hunt through the contests hub, removes the step where most casual voters drop off.

WPLG's contest pages state the per-IP daily limit but print nothing about outside assistance or vote services, so the binding constraint is the limit itself rather than a published anti-campaign policy. A push that respects the daily rule stays inside the terms the station set; a push that tries to defeat it puts the entry at the station's discretion. The general tactics that fit a daily-limit ballot, from reminder cadence to community sharing, are laid out in how to get more votes online.