Now On The For The Caseys Midwest Mystery Pizza: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the KHAK mystery pizza vote is and who runs it

The programme's full working title is Now On The For The Caseys Midwest Mystery Pizza, and the ballot page itself is titled "Vote Now on the Finalists for the Casey's 'Midwest Mystery Pizza'". The exercise is a naming vote: Casey's, the convenience-chain pizza brand, has a product it calls the 'Midwest Mystery Pizza', and KHAK is asking its audience to settle what the pizza should officially be called. The page's own framing puts it plainly, saying the pizza "needs an official name!".

The organizer is KHAK, an Iowa country radio station whose site brands it as 98.1 KHAK, the outlet calling itself #1 For New Country in Cedar Rapids country radio. The ballot is not farmed out to a voting platform: khak.com carries it directly, which means the station controls both the presentation of the finalists and the tally behind them.

In market terms this is a food vertical programme, not a general readers' survey. That distinguishes it from the station's other on-air promotions, which the site lists separately, things like a $500 Visa giveaway, Seize The Deal, the Brain and Courtlin Listener Lunch, First Responder Friday and the station's podcast and app pushes. The pizza naming vote is its own stand-alone ballot with its own page.

Facts at a glance

The dated record for the Casey's pizza naming vote

The ballot is a returning one. Confirmed editions of the KHAK naming vote ran in 2019, 2020, 2022, 2024, 2025 and 2026. Two calendar gaps sit inside that run, 2021 and 2023, and no edition is confirmed for either year, so the programme's history is best described as recurring rather than unbroken. Across those six confirmed years the ballot has kept the same subject and the same host, the Casey's pizza name decided on khak.com.

Within the live cycle the station has published one firm date: voting closes on September 23rd, and the winner is announced afterward, also in September. The evidence for the close date comes from the ballot page itself, where the station writes that voting "will close on September 23rd, with the winner announced on Septe..." with the announcement day cut off in the printed text. The opening day of the voting window, and any nomination or shortlisting round before the finalist stage, are not stated in the station's published material for this programme; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

The practical reading for a supporter is straightforward. September is the month that matters, the 23rd is the deadline that has been printed, and every earlier question about when the ballot opens or whether extra rounds exist has to be answered from the live page in the current cycle, not carried over from how a past year ran.

How a supporter votes for the mystery pizza name today

The mechanic is about as simple as a public ballot gets. A supporter opens the khak.com page titled "Vote Now on the Finalists for the Casey's 'Midwest Mystery Pizza'", reads the finalist names the station has shortlisted, picks the one they want, and submits. There is no category tree to work through and no nomination form to fill in, because the finalists already exist when the page goes live. The vote decides one thing, the pizza's official name.

What the published material does not spell out is the rulebook around that single choice. Nothing held for this programme states whether one supporter may submit once or return daily, whether an email address is collected, or who qualifies to take part. KHAK has not printed a per-supporter limit for the pizza ballot, so those details are settled by whatever the live form shows when you reach it.

Because khak.com hosts the ballot directly, with no outside voting platform involved, the behaviour you see is entirely KHAK's to set. That also means the page can change between cycles without any platform-wide announcement, which is one more reason to read the instructions on the ballot itself in September instead of relying on how a previous year's vote worked.

How this ballot sits beside Iowa's other public votes

Iowa readers who follow public ballots will know several much larger programmes in the state, and the KHAK pizza vote differs from all of them in shape. Cedar Rapids CommunityVotes and Best of Cedar Rapids from The Gazette are city-scale readers' surveys with many categories and local-business nominees. CITYVIEW's Best of Des Moines and the Business Record's Best of Des Moines do the same for the capital, while the Corridor Business Journal's Best of the Corridor covers the corridor business community and the AHBA Parade of Homes is a housing-industry programme out of Ames.

The Casey's naming vote is the opposite of those surveys in almost every dimension. It has one item instead of dozens, it is anchored to a radio station's audience rather than a city's readership, and khak.com carries it instead of a dedicated balloting platform. A vote here is a single choice among finalist names, so the effort a supporter spends is concentrated, not spread across categories.

For anyone researching Iowa ballots broadly, that difference matters when comparing rules. A daily-vote limit printed on a city survey tells you nothing about the radio ballot and vice versa, because each programme answers to a different publisher under separately published terms.

Strengthening support in a single-item radio ballot

Because this ballot asks one question, a naming choice among finalists, support campaigns here look different from pushes in a multi-category city survey. The audience that matters is the 98.1 KHAK listening base, people who already encounter the station on air and through its app and podcast, so outreach that reaches those listeners directly will always travel further than generic sharing.

The one date to build around is printed: voting closes September 23rd, and the winner is announced in September. A push that lands in the final days of the window reaches people while the ballot is still open, whereas support gathered early has to survive until the close to count toward the result the station announces.

On outside assistance, KHAK has published no policy for this ballot on help from third parties or on vote buying, so no rule from a different programme transfers here. Anyone weighing purchased support should first read our votes guide for what organic strengthening looks like, and check where bought votes stand legally before spending anything, since no vote service, ours included, can promise a win on a tally KHAK controls outright.