Best Holiday Pie Poll: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes in the Best Holiday Pie Poll and why

The Best Holiday Pie Poll exists because WLZW's listeners answer a question nobody can settle at the dinner table: which holiday pie is the absolute best. The station puts that question up on its own site at lite987.com each December, and the people who respond are ordinary listeners, not nominees, businesses or chambers. That is the whole community model. No fee is charged, no registration wall stands in the way, and anyone who can reach the page can weigh in.

The vote happens on the organizer's own site, not on an outside balloting service, and that shapes who participates. Lite 98 audiences already have the habit of visiting for features the site promotes alongside the poll, and the poll page itself is filed under Christmas, Food and Cooking and Just For Fun categories, signaling a seasonal fun vote rather than a formal awards program.

Because the poll leans on write-in answers, the crowd defines the outcome. A family's treasured recipe, a bakery's signature dessert and a supermarket classic all compete on equal footing, which is exactly why listeners return to argue for their pick.

The dated history: which years ran and when the window lands

Confirmed editions of the poll ran in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2023, 2024 and 2025. The gaps are real: nothing confirms a run in 2021 or 2022, so the program is annual in shape but not unbroken in history. The most recent confirmed edition was 2025, and 2026 is the next cycle to watch for.

Every confirmed edition is anchored to December. The poll appears during the holiday season, when the station frames it around time with loved ones, shopping and holiday baking, and closes out with a results share. The 2018 page put that results moment on the calendar specifically: Wednesday, December 19, when the station said it would share the results with listeners.

Two facts about the window are simply not printed. The ballot page does not state an open date or a close date for the voting window, and it describes no nomination or entry round before voting begins. The station's on-air promos and site posts are the practical signal that a new December window has started, because the ballot itself carries no countdown or published schedule.

That thinness of published detail is typical of a station fun poll. WLZW treats the poll as a seasonal conversation starter, not a formal awards program with a rulebook, so most of the operational detail lives in on-air mentions rather than on a standing page.

How to vote in the pie poll today

The mechanic is the simplest in the public-vote world. You open the ballot on lite987.com, read the question, and type the pie you think is the absolute best for the holiday season into the answer box. Then you submit. The station counts those answers up alongside everyone else's and shares the results once the window ends. No account, no email confirmation and no photo upload sits in the way.

The repeat rule is the part most polls hide and this one advertised. The 2018 ballot told supporters they could vote as many times per day as they would like. For a write-in poll, that means returning daily and typing the same pick again is participation the organizer invited, not gaming. WLZW has not printed any eligibility rule, identity requirement or limit beyond that daily line on the ballot page.

Practically, a supporter's routine looks like this: bookmark the ballot URL, type the pick once a day through the December window, and nudge friends to do the same, since each typed answer adds to the count. Because the format is write-in, spelling your pie the same way each day keeps the count clean; a station tallying free-text answers has to group them by hand or by match.

Keep the ballot page itself as the source of truth, since the station may adjust wording between cycles and nothing here substitutes for what the live form says.

How the pie poll sits beside other New York best-of votes

Best-of voting in New York is a crowded field, and the pie poll is the smallest and most personal entry in it. Where the larger programs organize whole cities or regions into nominee categories, WLZW's poll is a single question about dessert, run by a radio station for its listeners. That difference matters for anyone comparing the two: the pie poll's scope is the station's audience, not a metro area.

The nearest neighbours in this site's coverage are the big readers-choice ballots: Best of Brooklyn, Best of Queens, Best of the Bronx, The City's Best - Best of New York City, Best of Hudson Valley and Best of Westchester. Each of them runs under a separate publisher, keeps its own nominee structure and covers a defined geography, while the pie poll answers to WLZW alone.

The poll also differs in effort cost. A city-wide best-of asks supporters to find a business in a category list and click it; the pie poll asks for a sentence of typing. That low bar is why the station can invite unlimited daily participation and still keep the count manageable, and why the poll fits December, when attention is on food and family rather than on civic pride.

For a supporter, the practical upshot is that the pie poll is won by whoever shows up most often with a memorable pick, and no other New York ballot on this site shares its write-in format.

Strengthening support for a pie pick

Because the ballot counts typed answers and the 2018 page invited repeat daily votes, the honest way to build support is repetition plus reach: cast your pick every day of the December window and bring others with you. Ask family to type the same pie, share the ballot link in group chats, and remind people once the results date approaches, since late-window pushes land right before the station tallies. WLZW's guidance on outside help is thin, as no anti-manipulation wording is printed on the ballot page, but a station counting free-text answers can always disregard answers it finds suspect, so keep outreach human. If you want background on how support campaigns work on ballots like this, the award votes overview explains the general terrain without promising anything about this poll's outcome.