Iowa Best Burger Contest: How Voting Works & How to Win

A statewide burger ballot from an Iowa radio station

Most Iowa public-vote programs covered on this site are city readers polls: a newspaper or business journal asks a metro audience to pick favourites across dozens of categories. The Iowa Best Burger Contest is built differently. It is a single-question, statewide food competition, published through khak.com, the website of Iowa radio station KHAK, and it asks just one thing: which Iowa restaurant makes the state's best burger.

KHAK is a radio station, not a poll company, and the contest runs on the station's own site instead of any outside balloting service. The live 2026 ballot sits at the page KHAK titles Cast Your Vote Now in Iowa's 2026 Best Burger Competition. Coverage of the current cycle describes statewide beef industry groups joining the station in kicking off the seventeenth annual edition, a run that stretches back further than nearly any other Iowa food vote on this site.

The table below gathers the basics in one place.

Because the ballot covers the entire state rather than one metro, a restaurant in any corner of Iowa competes in the same pool, and the voting audience is similarly statewide.

The dated record: sixteen prior runs and the 2026 window

The contest's history is unusually well documented for a radio-station promotion. KHAK's own coverage traces it to a first edition in 2010, and the station has published a winners roundup listing champions for 2010, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023. The 2013 slot is absent from that list, so the run has at least one gap. The three most recent cycles, 2024, 2025 and 2026, are each confirmed by a live ballot page on khak.com, and the station bills the 2026 contest as the seventeenth annual edition.

One dated fact anchors the current cycle: the 2026 nomination period ran from February 9 through 5 p.m. on March 9, which KHAK describes as giving Iowans 29 days to cast their vote. All of that 29-day stretch fell inside the nomination phase, meaning supporters named the restaurant they wanted to win rather than choosing from a printed finalist list during that window.

What KHAK has not put on the ballot page is a per-supporter vote limit, an eligibility rule, or dates for any later rounds of the 2026 cycle; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The 2027 window is likewise unannounced. Given sixteen prior editions, an eighteenth cycle in 2027 is the natural expectation, but nothing published commits to it.

How an Iowan votes on the khak.com burger ballot

The mechanic is plain. A supporter opens the 2026 vote page on khak.com, finds the burger contest ballot, and submits the name of the Iowa restaurant they believe deserves the best-burger title. There is no bracket, no category menu, no login wall described on the page: the station's coverage frames it as a straight public nomination, asking readers directly which restaurant they want to win.

Timing matters more than technique here. Because the 2026 window ran February 9 through 5 p.m. on March 9, a restaurant's supporters had 29 days to act, and a push that started in the final week had only seven of those days left. The deadline was hard: once the window closed at 5 p.m. on March 9, the nomination phase for that edition was over.

For a restaurant backer, the practical sequence is simple. Share the khak.com vote page with regulars while the window is open, ask people to name your restaurant, and remind them before the cutoff. What the form permits in terms of repeat submissions is nowhere stated on the ballot page, so anyone planning a daily-return routine should follow what the live form actually allows rather than assume a rule KHAK has not stated. Any finalist round that follows the nomination phase would run on dates the ballot page does not list.

How this ballot differs from Iowa's city best-of polls

Set beside its Iowa neighbours on this site, the burger contest stands out on three axes. First, publisher type: it belongs to a radio station, while the others belong to print and business publications. The Best of Cedar Rapids poll comes from The Gazette, Best of Des Moines from CITYVIEW, and the Business Record runs its own Des Moines edition. Second, geography: this is a statewide food title, while those polls draw city or metro boundaries. Third, breadth: a single burger question instead of a multi-category ballot.

The Cedar Rapids CommunityVotes program and the Best of the Corridor poll follow the same readers-choice pattern, and the AHBA Parade of Homes shows the other end of the range, a housing event rather than a food or general readers poll.

For a supporter, the contrast has a practical edge. A restaurant near a metro line can appear in a city poll and still enter the statewide burger contest, because the electorates and the rules are entirely separate. A vote bank built for one ballot carries nothing to the other. Timing differs too: city polls tend to anchor to their publisher's annual cycle, while this window has historically opened in early February, months ahead of most spring readers polls.

Strengthening support within KHAK's rules

Because this ballot runs on KHAK's own site with a fixed 29-day window, support campaigns here are about reach and repetition inside the rules, not technique. A restaurant's fastest asset is its existing regulars: staff uniforms, table tents, and a pinned social post linking straight to the khak.com vote page all convert customers the business already sees. The contest's own framing, which restaurant do you want to win, invites exactly that kind of personal appeal.

What KHAK says about outside help is the gap: the ballot page publishes no statement on voting software, automated submissions, or purchased support, and no per-person cap. That silence is not permission. Where a contest's operator has not published a rule, the safe reading is that the operator reserves judgment, and a push that produces obviously irregular patterns risks the result regardless. For context on scale and methods, see our award votes overview, and read it against the station's terms before committing budget to a 29-day window.