The Best Boudin In Louisiana (gator995): How Voting Works & How to Win

A statewide food poll that answers to a radio station, not a chamber

Most Louisiana ballots with a readers-choice shape answer to a chamber of commerce or a city magazine. Best of Baton Rouge, Best of 225 and Best of New Orleans each run long category lists under a print or civic publisher. The Best Boudin In Louisiana is a different animal. It is a single-question public poll run by KNGT, the station listeners know as Gator 99.5, and it lives at gator995.com under the station's own masthead rather than on any outside balloting service.

That difference matters for anyone competing on it. A chamber contest spreads attention across dozens of categories, so a boudin maker competes with plumbers and dentists for the same voters. Here the whole ballot is the food question, and the station frames it with the state's own imagery: the smell of smoked meat, boudin and cracklins, and Zydeco on a Saturday morning. The page carries the station's own section labels, including Food, Drink, Cooking and Local News, which places it firmly in the station's food and culture coverage rather than in a formal awards program.

The audience is the station's audience. Gator 99.5 promotes the poll to its listeners across Louisiana, which means turnout comes from radio reach instead of from a membership directory or a magazine's subscriber base. For a boudin maker, that cuts both ways: the voters are exactly the people who eat the product, but they only hear about the ballot if the station or the nominees themselves put it in front of them.

The dated record: eight Decembers and one missing year

The poll has a long and mostly unbroken history for a station-run ballot. Confirmed editions ran in 2018, again in 2019, sat out 2020, and then returned every single year from 2021 onward through 2026. The gap sits in 2020, and nothing on the ballot page explains it. Every other year in that span has a confirmed run, which makes this one of the steadier food polls in the state.

The window is the other dated anchor. The confirmed cycle on file ran through December, with the voting phase inside that single month, and the station's own published material for the poll carries a late-December date stamp. That makes December the month to watch: nominees and their customers should expect the ballot to appear and close within the same month rather than stretching across a season.

What the station has not printed is just as relevant for planning. The ballot page gives no day-level open and close dates, no ceiling on repeat voting, no daily-return instruction and no eligibility text for nominees or voters. KNGT has not published a rules block for this poll; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The same holds for any round structure: no promotion or round schedule for this market exists beyond the ballot page itself, so the December window and the live page are the only timing signals a supporter gets.

For a nominee, the practical reading is simple. Treat early December as the likely start, watch the station's site and on-air mentions for the go-live, and assume the poll can close at any point before the month ends. Planning a push around a guessed closing date is the most common mistake on ballots with unpublished day-level timing.

How a supporter votes today

Voting here could hardly be simpler. A supporter opens the ballot page at gator995.com/vote-the-best-boudin-in-louisiana/, reads the nominees, selects a choice and submits the poll form. No third-party balloting service sits in the middle, no separate account is required on another domain, and no nomination round comes first. The vote happens on the station's own domain, under the station's own banner.

Because the poll lives at gator995.com, the page also carries the station's normal furniture: listen-live links, merchandising, and the site's category labels such as Food and Cooking. A supporter who lands on the ballot from a radio mention or a social post is already inside the station's ecosystem, which is exactly the turnout path the poll is built on.

What the form does after submission is the one open question. The page prints nothing about repeat voting, so whether one person can return daily or vote once is settled only by whatever the live form enforces in the current cycle. Supporters should read the instructions on the page before trying to vote twice, and nominees should never advise their customers to do anything the page does not permit.

The sequence for the current cycle, in order: open the ballot page, check the nominee list and any printed instructions, select the preferred boudin maker, submit, and confirm the page acknowledges the vote. Anyone supporting a nominee should do all of it inside the December window, since the closing day is not published in advance.

Where this ballot sits among Louisiana's best-of contests

Louisiana has no shortage of public-vote programs, and this poll's neighbours show how crowded the field is. Best of SWLA covers the Lake Charles region with a broad best-of format, and Alexandria Community's Choice Awards and Bayou's Best Community's Choice Awards do the same for their own markets. Each of those is a multi-category civic or publisher-run contest with its own nomination and voting rounds.

The boudin poll differs on three axes. First, it is statewide in framing: the question is the best boudin in Louisiana, not the best in one parish or metro, so a winner can come from anywhere in the state. Second, it is single-topic, which concentrates every vote and every promotional push on one food question instead of diluting attention across a category book. Third, it answers to a radio station, so its promotion runs through on-air mentions and the station's site rather than through a chamber newsletter or a magazine's distribution.

For a boudin maker deciding where to spend effort, the contrast is the whole point. A chamber contest rewards businesses that can mobilize a local customer base across many categories at once. This poll rewards whoever can turn out the most boudin-specific support in a single December month, and the station's listenership is the pool both sides are drawing from. A nominee can compete in both kinds of ballots in the same year, but the messaging that wins here is narrower and more food-driven than what a general best-of contest asks for.

Turning listeners into votes in December

Because the whole ballot is one food question on a radio station's site, support campaigns here should be food-first and listener-aware. Ask customers at the counter while the December window is live, post the gator995.com ballot link with a photo of the product, and lean on the Zydeco-Saturday culture the station itself invokes. The poll's single-topic format means every share and every mention lands on the only question that counts. Our votes guide covers outreach that fits a short, unpublished window like this one, and award-vote support is described separately for ballots with this shape. Whatever route a nominee takes, the station's page is the rulebook: it names no vote ceiling and no eligibility text, so the live form governs what is allowed in the current cycle.