Now Which High School Marching Band In Se Mn Is Best: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the KROC-FM marching band vote is and who runs it

Now Which High School Marching Band In SE MN Is Best is a best-of poll run by KROC-FM, a commercial radio station broadcasting at 106.9 MHz and serving Rochester, Minnesota. The station's audience reaches across southeast Minnesota, and the vote asks that audience a single question: which high school marching band in the region is best. Unlike many reader polls that sit on a third-party balloting service, this one is carried on kroc.com, the station's own web home, under the station's contest banner.

The format is a two-stage award. First, KROC-FM spends about a week asking listeners to nominate their favorite local high school marching bands. Then the station opens a public voting round and asks the same audience to help crown the winner among the nominated programs. The page's own language frames the second stage as the decisive one: the station needs the audience's help crowning the winner.

The ballot lives at kroc.com/vote-now-which-high-school-marching-band-in-se-mn-is-best/, and that address is the only confirmed entry point for the vote. Because the host is KROC-FM itself, everything a supporter needs, from the nominated band list to the daily voting rule, is published on the station's pages rather than on an external platform.

The dated timeline: which editions ran and when the window falls

The vote is annual, and its confirmed editions ran in 2018, 2019, 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026. That list makes 2026 the most recent run and 2027 the next expected cycle. The gap between 2019 and 2023 is part of the published history; the vote did not appear in the intervening years, and the station restarted it afterward on the same kroc.com address.

The clearest dated window comes from the 2018 edition. Voting started when the ballot went live and ran through Friday, September 7. The race stayed close enough that KROC-FM posted an update extending the vote through Sunday, September 9, and reminded supporters that they could vote once a day and should check back. That extension is the only confirmed close-date change in the vote's published history.

Later editions have kept the September slot, but the station sets each year's exact open and close dates when that round launches. The ballot page also does not print a standing roster of nominated bands or an eligibility rule for nominees; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Any nomination-round dates for the current year follow the same pattern and are announced on the station's pages when the round begins.

For planning purposes, the reliable shape is this: a nomination week in late summer, a voting round in September, and a close that KROC-FM may extend if the race is tight, as it did in 2018.

How a supporter votes in the KROC-FM band poll today

Voting here is a straightforward fan ballot carried on KROC-FM's own pages. A supporter loads the kroc.com ballot during the September voting round, reviews the nominated southeast Minnesota high school marching bands, selects a favorite and submits the choice through the vote control on the page. No third-party login, no external balloting service and no separate platform account sit between the supporter and the ballot, because KROC-FM hosts the vote itself.

The one published frequency rule is the daily reset: the station states that a supporter can vote once a day and should check back. That makes the 2018 extension meaningful. When KROC-FM pushed the close from Friday, September 7 to Sunday, September 9, every additional day was another full daily ballot for each supporter who returned. A band community that organizes around the daily return gets one fresh vote per person per day until the round closes.

Nothing on the ballot page describes a vote cap beyond the daily rule, an identity check, or a verification step, and the station has not published terms covering those points. The practical sequence is therefore short: open the page, pick a band, vote, and come back the next day. The nominated band list itself is rebuilt from listener nominations each edition, so the options a supporter sees in September are the programs the audience put forward during the nomination week.

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

Southeast Minnesota has no shortage of public votes, but this one is unusual in three ways. First, KROC-FM is a radio station, while most competing programs answer to newspapers or reader's-choice networks. Second, the subject is a single school activity, high school marching bands, instead of a broad directory of local businesses and services. Third, the vote runs on KROC-FM's home domain, so the ballot's rules and dates come straight from the station rather than from a balloting vendor.

The nearest neighbour by market is CommunityVotes Rochester, which covers the same city with a wide multi-category ballot. Statewide, Minnesota's Best and Best of the Midwest run broader best-of programs, while CommunityVotes Duluth, the Best of the Best Brainerd Lakes Area and the Best of the Best from the Duluth News Tribune serve other regions of the state.

What separates the KROC-FM vote from all of them is focus. A band parent, a booster club or a school's band program competes here against a handful of peer marching bands rather than against hundreds of businesses, and the voting window is a tight September round rather than a months-long season. For a southeast Minnesota band community, this ballot is the one public vote where a marching band is the entire contest, and the daily-return mechanic rewards an organized fan base more than any of the wider best-of ballots do.

Strengthening support for a band on the KROC-FM ballot

Because KROC-FM publishes a one-vote-per-day rule, the strongest honest push is organized repetition. Band directors and booster clubs can set a daily reminder for the whole September window, share the kroc.com ballot link in the program's existing parent and alumni channels, and ask every supporter to return each day rather than voting once and forgetting. The 2018 extension through Sunday, September 9 shows that late days matter when the race is close.

Keep the push inside the station's published mechanic. The station has not printed terms on outside vote help for this poll, so anything beyond genuine daily support from real supporters carries risk that only the station could rule on. For a wider view of legitimate promotion, see our guide on getting more votes online, and treat any paid shortcut, including services described on our award votes page, as a decision to weigh against the organizer's terms, not a guaranteed path to the crown.