For The Best Hairstylist Or Barber In The Evansville Area: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the WGBF hairstylist and barber ballot is, and who runs it

For The Best Hairstylist Or Barber In The Evansville Area is a public vote run by WGBF, a news-talk radio station broadcasting in Evansville, Indiana. The station's website is newstalk1280.com, and the ballot lives there rather than on a third-party contest platform. The article carries the headline Best Hairstylist or Barber in the Southern Indiana Area and the tagline Who Will Make the Cut?, which tells you immediately that this is a station promotion aimed at its own listeners rather than a regional readers-choice survey run by a newspaper chain.

The framing on the page is personal. The station writes that it is on the search for the best hairstylist and/or barber in the Evansville area, and that it needs the audience's help to find them. That wording matters for a salon or barber shop deciding whether to campaign for votes: the ballot is a single profession-focused question, not a long list of categories, and the audience being asked is the station's Tri-State news-talk audience. The page sits under the site's Best of Evansville section, alongside the station's newsletter promotion.

For a nominating business, the practical shape is simple. One page, one question, one window, hosted on the organizer's own domain. There is no external platform to register with, which lowers the barrier for clients who want to vote but also means the station controls every rule on that page. The table below collects the fixed facts.

The dated facts: which years ran, and when the window falls

The ballot has a five-year history. Editions ran in 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026, all on the same URL at newstalk1280.com, which makes this one of the more stable local ballots in the market. A station that posts the same vote article five years running is treating it as a fixture, and the reasonable expectation is a fresh edition in 2027, though the station has not printed that plan anywhere.

The window is the other dated fact worth fixing. In the cycle the page describes, voting ran through 11:59pm on Friday, April 29th, and the station stated it would update the article and post the final results after the close. That puts the ballot in spring, which matters for a salon planning a client push: the campaign season is short, and the deadline lands on a Friday night, not a weekend or a month-end.

One fact the station leaves off the page is the exact open and close pair for the current cycle. That April close is evidence of a pattern, not a promise, and the station rewrites the article for each edition. A salon that assumes last year's dates and schedules its client push around them risks campaigning after the form has already closed. The exact voting and nomination window dates for the edition now running are not printed in advance; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Another gap belongs in this section because it is a dated fact by nature: the station has not published round dates for any nomination phase. The page reads as a single voting window with no separate entry round, but if a future edition splits into nominate-then-vote, the split will show up only on the live article.

How a supporter votes today, step by step

The mechanic is about as plain as a public vote gets. A supporter opens the vote article at newstalk1280.com, reads the invitation to cast a vote for the best hairstylist and/or barber in the Evansville area, and submits the vote in the form on that page. There is no external contest platform, no separate login, and no second site to trust. The station hosts the ballot on its own domain, which means the form on the article is the single authority on what a vote requires.

Because the host is the station's own site, the supporter experience is shaped by the article itself. The page opens with the search framing, then the invitation to vote, and the dates sit near the top. A supporter who arrives from a salon's social post should land on the article, see the window, and vote in one sitting. That simplicity is the ballot's biggest asset for a nominating business: every extra step between a client and the submit button costs votes, and this ballot has almost none.

What the form does after submission is not published ahead of time. The station has not printed whether it limits repeat votes, requires an email, or confirms by any particular method. The honest instruction to a client is to follow the form as it appears on the day, because the station can change the mechanics between editions without notice anywhere else. After the window closes, the same article carries the results, since the station commits to updating it and posting the final outcome there.

How this ballot sits beside its Indiana neighbours

Evansville supports more than one public vote, and a salon deciding where to invest effort should know the difference. The nearest neighbour is CommunityVotes Evansville Best Of, a multi-category community survey that covers the whole city with dozens of fields at once. The WGBF ballot is the opposite shape: one profession, one question, one station audience. A hairstylist or barber competes against fewer nominees on the WGBF page but reaches a smaller, radio-defined audience doing it.

Statewide, the same publisher family runs Best of Indiana, and other Indiana markets run their own community ballots: CommunityVotes Bloomington IN Best Of, CommunityVotes Fort Wayne Best Of, YourChoiceAwards South Bend Best Of, and the Best of Elkhart County survey. None of those is a substitute for this one, because none of them asks the Evansville radio audience specifically about hairstylists and barbers.

What makes the WGBF ballot distinctive is the host. Every neighbour on that list runs on a dedicated contest platform with structured nomination rounds. WGBF runs its vote on its own news site, rewrites the article each spring, and keeps the whole thing to a single window. For a barber shop, that means the campaign is a short, concentrated April effort aimed at clients who listen to the station, not a months-long presence in a city-wide directory.

Strengthening support in the WGBF hairstylist ballot

A salon or barber shop campaigning on this ballot has one lever that matters most: timing. The window is short and spring-loaded, closing at 11:59pm on a Friday in April in the cycle the page describes, so a client push that starts after the close date is worth nothing. The first move is to read the dates on the live article the week the station posts it, then plan the campaign backwards from the deadline.

The second lever is precision. Because the vote sits on the article page at newstalk1280.com, the exact address is the only thing clients need. A post that says vote for us somewhere on the station's domain loses votes to friction; a post with the direct link does not. Put the link in the salon's own channels, on the appointment confirmation, and at the front desk, and ask clients while they are still in the chair.

On outside help, the honest position is that the station has not published rule text for this ballot in the material available here, so nobody can quote WGBF's policy on purchased or automated votes. What any organizer's rules do in cases like this is govern the ballot, and an organizer that finds rule-breaking can delete votes or disqualify a nominee entirely. A campaign built on real clients asking real clients carries no such exposure. For a wider view of the tactics that work on public ballots of this shape, see how to get more votes online, and for the service side, buy award votes explains what vote packages are.