For South Jerseys Funniest Back To School Photo: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Funniest Back to School Photo ballot is and who runs it

For South Jerseys Funniest Back To School Photo is a seasonal photo poll run by WSJO, the radio station better known to listeners as SoJO 104.9. The station is a Townsquare Media property that plays pop music for the Atlantic City, New Jersey market, and the contest lives on the broadcaster's own website rather than on an outside balloting platform. The vote page sits at sojo1049.com under the same domain that carries the station's other listener promotions, which makes it easy to verify that the ballot belongs to the broadcaster and not to an aggregator.

The idea is built around a local moment. When South Jersey kids go back to class in September, the station asks parents to send in their funniest first-day photos. Staff at SoJO 104.9 pick their favorites from the submissions, and those selected photos are put to a fan vote on the website. The site tags the page under Community, Contests, Lifestyle, Parenting, Photos and Poll, which reflects how the station positions it: a light community feature for families, not a business ranking.

Facts at a glance

Because the station hosts the vote itself, every rule that governs the ballot is whatever WSJO prints on its own pages, and the daily return instruction is the clearest of those.

The dated record for the back-to-school photo vote

Edition years on file for this ballot are 2019 plus every year from 2021 through 2026. There is no 2020 edition in that list, which lines up with the year the pandemic disrupted ordinary school calendars and station programming alike. Every confirmed cycle since 2021 has run without interruption, making the poll a steady early-September fixture on sojo1049.com rather than a one-off promotion.

The window itself is tied to the school calendar. The page tells supporters to come back each day through Sunday, September 17th to cast another vote, and the entry side of the cycle closes earlier: the deadline to submit a photo entry is 11:59 p.m. EST on Monday, September 12th. The submission form runs first, then WSJO selects favorites, then the fan vote goes live with the selected photos.

What the station has not printed is any rule text around the vote. The ballot page publishes no vote cap, no daily-limit terms beyond the return instruction, and no eligibility requirements for entrants or voters; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The exact date the vote opens is also not stated, only the date it closes. A family planning around the contest should therefore watch the SoJO 104.9 site in the first days of September, since the entry deadline lands before mid-month and the vote window is short.

How a supporter votes in the SoJO 104.9 photo poll today

The mechanic on the ballot is as simple as radio promotions get. A supporter opens the vote page on sojo1049.com during the September window, scrolls through the photos the station selected from the entries submitted before the 11:59 p.m. EST Monday, September 12th deadline, and presses the vote control beside the funniest picture. No login step, fee or registration is printed anywhere on the vote page, so the action is a plain public click on the station's own site.

The instruction that gives the ballot its shape is the return rule. The page tells supporters to come back each day through Sunday, September 17th to cast another vote. That makes the daily return the main lever a family has: a photo backed by relatives and friends who each vote every day accumulates far more weight than a photo whose supporters vote once and forget. Since the window closes on a Sunday, the strongest push falls in the final weekend.

Nothing on the page suggests a second round, a runoff or a scored judging phase. The entry form and the fan vote are the whole cycle as printed. If WSJO changes that structure in a later September, the change would appear on the station's own ballot page, so an entrant preparing for the next cycle should read the live page rather than assume last cycle's format carried over unchanged.

Where this ballot sits among New Jersey's other vote programs

New Jersey has a busy public-vote scene, and the SoJO 104.9 photo poll occupies a distinct corner of it. Most of the state's best-of balloting is broad readers-choice work: the Asbury Park Press Readers' Choice and the Best of Bergen Community's Choice Awards let the public vote across many business and service categories, while Best of New Jersey covers the whole state under its own publisher.

WSJO's ballot is narrower and more personal. It has no business categories at all; the entries are children's back-to-school photos, the audience is the station's family-heavy pop audience around Atlantic City, and the cycle lasts only the first half of September. Related but different market programs include the Best of Jersey Shore Contest, the Jersey Bites Monmouth County Readers' Choice and Bergen & Morris Top Dentists, each answering to its own publisher.

For a family, the practical difference is scale. Winning a statewide best-of poll usually means mobilizing a large network for weeks. Winning the SoJO 104.9 photo vote means rallying enough local supporters to return daily through a window that ends Sunday, September 17th. That is a friendlier ask, and it is why the photo poll rewards personal networks more than advertising budgets.

Strengthening support for a photo entry in this poll

Everything about this ballot favors steady, personal outreach. The mechanic WSJO printed is the daily return through Sunday, September 17th, so the most effective legitimate push is a reminder habit: text the ballot link to relatives each morning, post it in local parent groups, and ask each supporter to come back every day, not once. A short window like this one means a photo can be overtaken in the final weekend, so consistency matters more than a single burst on the first day. The station has not published any statement about outside vote help or automated tools for this poll, which cuts both ways: nothing is authorized, and nothing is explicitly banned beyond what the ballot itself says. A cautious entrant treats any bulk or automated voting as a risk to the entry and leans on the organic daily-return route the station itself designed. Before spending anything on vote services for a photo poll like this, read our award votes page to understand how these services generally work and what they can and cannot promise against an organizer's rules.