Best Bagel Hudson Valley Poll: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Best Bagel Hudson Valley Poll is and who runs it

WPDA runs the Best Bagel Hudson Valley Poll as one round of its Boris & Robyn Battle of the Best franchise. The organizer is a New York radio station, and the ballot is served straight from the wpdh.com domain, so no external balloting vendor sits between the listener and the vote. That matters for supporters: every rule, nominee and closing instruction a voter sees is printed by the station itself.

The 2019 ballot carried the title Battle of the Best 2019: Best Bagel, and its introduction lays out the format in two sentences. Boris and Robyn took listener nominations for the best eateries in the Hudson Valley, and the public then chooses a favorite in the Battle of the Best. The bagel round is the single category this page follows, which makes it narrower than a multi-category readers' poll: one food item, one region, one winner.

The market is the Hudson Valley region of New York, and the vertical is best-of, meaning the ballot ranks local businesses rather than people, teams or creative works. The vote itself is a straightforward public poll. Any listener who reaches the page can cast a ballot for the shop they want to win, subject only to the daily rule the station prints.

What the WPDA bagel ballot confirms by date

The confirmed 2019 edition was published on January 21, 2019, and its voting window sat inside that month, with the printed rule running through Friday, Feb. 1. That gives the program a fully dated anchor cycle: a publication day, a month of voting and a stated close.

A second confirmed edition exists for 2026. Those two anchors, 2019 and 2026, are why the bagel round counts as an annual fixture on the WPDA schedule instead of a single promotional stunt, and the station's Battle of the Best section is where each new round appears.

Several facts sit outside the printed ballot text. WPDA prints no exact opening or closing day for the current cycle; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The station also prints no full roster of the Battle of the Best categories alongside the bagel round, so which other eaterie matchups run in a given year is not stated on the page. No nominee eligibility text appears with the ballot either, and the station's promotional calendar lists no separate round dates for this market.

What the printed text does establish is the shape of a cycle: a nomination round handled on air by Boris and Robyn, a public voting phase on the station's site, and a daily per-IP limit that governs how the vote accumulates. Everything a supporter needs beyond that shape comes from the live page in the year they vote.

How a supporter votes in the Battle of the Best bagel round

The action is deliberately simple. Voting starts at the WPDA ballot page itself: a supporter reads the short Boris and Robyn introduction, picks the nominated Hudson Valley bagel shop they want to win, and submits. No account creation, no entry form and no payment step sit in front of the vote; the ballot is the page.

The one printed rule that shapes behavior is the daily limit. The 2019 page stated it plainly: you can vote once per day per IP address through Friday, Feb. 1. Two things follow from that sentence. First, a supporter who wants a shop to win returns every day of the open window, because each new day restores their vote. Second, the limit is attached to the connection, not the person, so a shop can multiply its support by reaching voters on many different connections rather than by asking the same fan to retry.

For a business, that daily structure turns the poll into a campaign of reminders rather than a single push. A morning social post, a counter sign, a register mention: each one works best when it lands on a day the supporter has not yet voted. The window in the confirmed cycle ran through the first day of February, which is a short runway, so the shops that win tend to be the ones that start reminding customers on the first day of the month rather than the last week.

Where this ballot sits among New York best-of programs

New York's best-of scene is crowded, and this WPDA poll occupies a specific corner of it. It is radio-run and food-specific: one station, one franchise, one category about a single beloved item. The neighboring programs on this site answer to different organizers and different shapes.

Best of Hudson Valley is the magazine-run readers' poll covering the same region with a broad category slate, so a bagel shop could plausibly appear in both without the two ballots sharing anything but geography. Best of Brooklyn, Best of Queens, Best of the Bronx and Best of Westchester cover borough and county markets the Hudson Valley poll does not touch, and The City's Best, Best of New York City takes the five-borough view.

What makes the WPDA round different is the nomination layer. Boris and Robyn gather the nominee field on air before the public votes, so the ballot is curated by the station's hosts rather than assembled from open submissions. That gives the round a smaller, radio-audience-shaped field and a personal tone the magazine polls do not have. For a bagel shop deciding where to spend effort, the choice is between a broad multi-category magazine ballot and this single-category, host-driven vote with a daily per-IP rule.

Building support for a Hudson Valley bagel shop in this poll

The daily per-IP rule is the whole strategy. One enthusiastic fan voting repeatedly from one connection adds nothing after the first ballot of the day, so a shop's job is to reach as many distinct supporters as possible and to remind each of them daily. Counter cards, register receipts, a pinned social post and a staff script all work because each touches a different connection.

WPDA prints no statement about purchased or automated votes on the ballot page, so the organizer's own text sets no published position for a shop to weigh. What the printed rule does reward is steady daily participation from real customers across the window, which in the confirmed cycle ran through the first days of February. For shops weighing outside help against that structure, our guide to getting more votes online covers the tactics that fit public daily ballots, and our award-votes page explains how purchased volume is typically scoped for best-of contests of this kind.