For The Best Marching Band In Mercer County: How Voting Works & How to Win

One county, one question: how this WPST ballot differs from New Jersey's bigger best-of votes

Most best-of ballots in New Jersey cast a wide net. The Best of New Jersey programme and the Asbury Park Press Readers' Choice spread across whole regions and dozens of categories at once. This vote does the opposite. It stays inside a single county, names a single subject, and asks one question: which high school marching band in Mercer County is the best of the best? The station's own framing puts the decision entirely with the public.

WPST is the organizer, a Princeton, New Jersey radio station heard on WPST-FM as 94.5 PST and owned by Townsquare Media. The station plays contemporary hits for central New Jersey, and it runs this vote on its own website, with no outside balloting vendor involved. The ballot lives at wpst.com, alongside the station's other listener promotions, which means the contest carries the station's own navigation, its own rules pages and its own on-air branding.

The fixed facts

Every row above traces to the ballot page or to WPST's published contest material. The sections that follow take each item in turn: the dated run of editions, the literal voting mechanic, and how this county-level vote sits beside the larger New Jersey ballots around it.

The dated run: eight editions, one missing year, and a December anchor

The confirmed run is long for a station promotion. Editions are confirmed for 2018, 2019, 2020 and then 2022 through 2026, eight cycles in all with a single gap at 2021. A programme that has survived that many Decembers on the same URL is not a one-off promotion; it is a recurring feature of the station's contest calendar, and having reached 2026 the programme points toward a 2027 cycle.

The month is the most reliable date on the page. The confirmed editions anchor their live rounds to December, and the station's own ballot text shows how a round moves: listeners are told the field will narrow to the semifinals, the top four schools, on a Monday around noon, and are urged to keep votes coming so a favorite school does not fall out of the running. That mid-round cut to four is the structural event of the cycle, and it is the moment when a band's position becomes most visible.

WPST leaves the precise start and finish of each round off the printed page; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. No slate of categories is published anywhere for this vote, since the programme names a single subject rather than a slate of categories. Treat the December anchor and the top-four cut as the fixed points, and read the live page for everything dated inside the window.

How a supporter actually votes in the WPST marching band contest

The mechanic is deliberately simple, and the station's published rules spell out the one limit that matters. In the 2024 cycle, WPST's contest rules described a submission period that began on Thursday, September 19, 2024 at 8:00 a.m. and ran through 11:59 p.m. on September 29, 2024, during which listeners were invited to visit wpst.com and nominate their favorite high school. That nomination phase feeds the voting rounds that follow in December.

Once voting is live, the same rules page sets the cap: only one vote per voter per day will be accepted. A supporter hoping to lift a band up the board therefore performs one action repeatedly rather than one action intensively. The sequence is to open the ballot, find the school, cast the single daily vote, and come back the next day while the round stays open. There is no account wall described in the station's material and no paid ballot tier; the vote is free and the daily return is the whole game.

The December structure adds a second decision point. When the field cuts to the top four, the station tells listeners to check back on Monday to vote in the semifinals, so a supporter's calendar matters as much as their enthusiasm. Missing the semifinal Monday means missing the round where a school can take home the bragging rights. Supporters who organize their band community around the daily reset, and who flag the semifinal Monday in advance, give their school the fullest use of the rules the station allows.

Where this ballot sits among New Jersey's reader-vote programmes

The sibling ballots around this one are bigger, broader and mostly run by publishers rather than radio stations. The Best of Bergen Community's Choice Awards and the Bergen & Morris Top Dentists serve the northern counties, the Best of Jersey Shore Contest covers the coast, and the Jersey Bites Monmouth County Readers' Choice is a food-focused readers' poll. All of them, like this vote, live in the best-of vertical, but none of them is a single-subject school competition.

Three differences set the WPST vote apart. First, the subject: no other programme in the group is built around high school marching bands, which means its supporters are students, band parents and school communities rather than general readers. Second, the geography: Mercer County is a single county in central New Jersey, so the ballot is local in a way the statewide programmes are not. Third, the host: WPST runs the vote on its own site, so the rules, the nomination phase and the December rounds all answer to one station rather than to a balloting vendor.

For a supporter, those differences matter in practice. A single-county field means a school's rival is likely a neighboring district, and the top-four cut means momentum in the middle of the round decides who reaches the semifinals. The Best of Jersey Shore Contest shows the regional pattern this vote deliberately avoids, and readers comparing New Jersey ballots should weigh whether they want a broad catalogue or one sharp question.

Strengthening support within the station's rules

Everything legal and effective in this programme flows from the one-vote-per-voter-per-day rule WPST publishes. A band that wants to win needs its supporters to show up every day of the round, not once at the start, and the December timing means the daily habit has to survive the school calendar. Band directors and parent groups typically do best when they name the daily habit explicitly, remind supporters on each new day of the round, and put the semifinal Monday on the calendar the moment the station announces the top four.

The station's rules are the boundary for any organized push: ballots outside the published daily limit do not help a school, and a campaign that respects the limit is the only kind that counts toward the total. For a fuller walkthrough of daily-return organizing, reminder timing and supporter outreach that fits public ballots like this one, see our guide to getting more votes online. The short version for Mercer County band families is simple: one ballot, every day, from as many distinct supporters as the band community can reach, with special attention to the December rounds and the cut to the top four.