WSVN People’s Choice: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the WSVN People's Choice vote is and who runs it

The WSVN People's Choice vote is the public-vote award attached to the Seminole Hard Rock Winterfest Boat Parade, the Fort Lauderdale event billed on its own site as The Most Spectacular Show on H2O. The parade is run by Winterfest, Inc., whose copyright line appears on the event site, and the television coverage is produced by WSVN Channel 7, the station whose name the vote carries. The ballot sits on the parade's own site at winterfestparade.com, under the WSVN tag that gathers the parade's vote coverage in one place.

In vertical terms this is a best-of program: rather than electing an officeholder, the ballot asks the public to pick favorites connected to the parade, with the People's Choice Award and the parade winners decided by public vote. The market is Fort Lauderdale and the wider Miami-Fort Lauderdale metro in Florida, and the audience is the parade's television and waterfront audience, who are invited to watch on TV and vote. The table below collects what the event site itself establishes about this program.

The dated record for the People's Choice vote

The parade's site menu carries a dated headline for the coming cycle: 12.12.26 6pm, which fixes the 2026 parade's date and starting time. Voting for the People's Choice Award falls in December, the same month as the parade itself. The program shows edition years of 2025 and 2026, which is the basis for calling it an annual fixture, and 2027 is the next cycle it could run.

Beyond that, several facts stay off the page. Winterfest has not printed the specific days on which the December vote opens and closes, the list of categories on the ballot, or any rule limiting how many times a single person may vote; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The site's own menu points to the pieces a supporter needs: a Watch on TV and Vote page, a TV Airings schedule, a Parade Viewing Area guide, and a Vote for People's Choice Award & Parade Winners page. Those four links are where the live dates, the ballot itself and any rules would appear once the cycle opens, so a supporter planning around the 12.12.26 6pm parade should read them directly rather than rely on a summary written for a previous cycle.

How a supporter votes on the Winterfest ballot today

Voting is built around watching. The parade site's menu carries a Watch on TV and Vote page, and the site tells viewers not to worry if they forgot a boat's number, because they can simply watch the television special produced by WSVN Channel 7 and vote from there. The literal sequence is short: open the WSVN tag on winterfestparade.com, follow the Vote for People's Choice Award & Parade Winners link, watch the TV airings or follow along from the Parade Viewing Area, and cast a public vote for the favorite.

Because the ballot is a simple public vote, no account beyond what the form itself asks for is described on the page, and no paid or gated tier is mentioned anywhere in the vote coverage. The vote runs alongside the parade's other public contests, which the menu lists as the Winterfest Get Away Sweepstakes, the Festive Pet Costume Contest, the Winterfest Decorating Contest and the Winterfest Foundation Student Art program. A supporter who wants the People's Choice result should treat the ballot page as the single source for the live form, since the surrounding pages describe the parade and the broadcast rather than the vote's fine print.

How this ballot sits beside Florida's other best-of votes

Within Florida's best-of landscape this ballot sits beside six sibling programs, each run under its own publisher. The Best of Florida Awards covers the whole state, the Best of Miami Readers' Poll serves the Miami market, Best of Orlando runs the readers-choice poll for that city, Best of Tallahassee covers the capital, Best of the Bay serves the Tampa Bay area, and Best in Destin covers the Panhandle resort town.

What separates the WSVN People's Choice from all six is its subject: it is not a general business or readers poll but an award attached to one specific event, the Seminole Hard Rock Winterfest Boat Parade, and the form is hosted on the event domain itself, not on a media brand's contest platform. That also shapes its calendar. The siblings typically follow a publication's own annual cycle, while this vote is anchored to the parade's December date and to WSVN Channel 7's broadcast of it. A reader comparing Florida public-vote programs can follow the sibling pages to see how each market structures its ballot, then return to the parade tag page for the People's Choice form itself.

Strengthening support during the December broadcast window

Support in this program works differently from a typical readers poll, because the vote is tied to a broadcast. The strongest push a nominee can make is one that reaches the parade's audience while it is already watching: the TV airings, the Watch on TV and Vote page and the waterfront viewing area are all moments when a supporter can be pointed straight to the ballot. The parade's site publishes no stated rule about outside help with voting, so any push should stay within what the live form itself allows. For a broader playbook that works across public-vote contests, see our votes guide, and for the position on paid support read our legality page. Details of paid vote packages for award ballots sit on our pricing page.