For The Father Mows Best Contest: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Father Mows Best Contest is and who runs it

The For The Father Mows Best Contest is a public-vote promotion run by WYRK, the Buffalo country station that brands itself as Buffalo Country Radio - 106.5 WYRK. The premise is built around Father's Day: the station tells listeners that dad should get the day off, but if he still wants to mow the lawn, he should do it with style, and the community gets to decide which dad is getting a new lawnmower. The prize is the mower itself, which keeps the contest concrete and easy to rally around.

The vote happens on wyrk.com itself; no outside balloting platform is involved in running it. The ballot lives at wyrk.com/vote-for-the-father-mows-best-contest-winner/, a page that sits alongside the station's other promotions, its concert calendar and its giveaway listings. Because the host and the organizer are the same operation, everything a supporter needs, from the ballot to the rules, stays on one domain.

The station's formal side is worth noting. Its published contest rules are available Monday through Friday during normal business hours at 14 Lafayette Square, Suite 1200, Buffalo, NY 14203, and at wyrk.com. That printed address and the rules page give the contest a level of accountability many small radio giveaways never bother with.

The dated history of the Father Mows Best ballot

Confirmed editions of the contest appear in 2018, 2022, 2024, 2025 and 2026. That list is not a continuous annual run from the start: there is a gap between 2018 and 2022, and another between 2022 and 2024. What it does show is a contest that has settled into a rhythm, with three consecutive editions in 2024, 2025 and 2026, all timed to Father's Day in June.

The voting window falls in June, anchored to Father's Day. The most recent printed cycle carried a clear close: voting ran through Thursday, June 15th, with Clay, Dale and Liz promoting the push on air while the window was open. That June 15th close is the one dated fact the ballot page states plainly, and it is the anchor for understanding when each cycle lands.

Several details sit outside what the page prints. The station has not published a standing opening date, a list of ballot categories, or a per-supporter vote cap and eligibility text that holds from one edition to the next; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The same applies to any nomination round that might precede voting, since the ballot page presents the vote itself without printing a separate entry phase.

Given the three consecutive recent editions and the fixed Father's Day anchor, a 2027 edition is the natural expectation. The station's contest page is where that announcement will appear, and the ballot URL stays the same from one June to the next.

How a supporter votes in the Father Mows Best Contest today

The mechanic is deliberately simple, which suits a radio audience. A supporter opens the ballot page on wyrk.com, reads the current cycle's framing, picks the dad they believe deserves the new lawnmower, and submits the pick. There is no app download, no account creation step printed on the ballot page, and no outside platform holding the vote; everything happens directly on the station's domain.

Timing matters more than technique. Because the printed window closed on Thursday, June 15th in the most recent cycle, and the contest is anchored to Father's Day, the practical move is to check the ballot page in early June and vote while the window is open. The station promotes the vote through Clay, Dale and Liz's on-air presence, so listeners hear about the cycle while it is live rather than discovering it after the close.

What the ballot page does not spell out is the fine print around repeat voting. Whether a supporter may return daily, whether any login or email verification applies, and how the station handles a surge of votes near the close are not printed as standing rules on the page. The station's formal contest rules, available at its Buffalo office and on wyrk.com, are the place a finalist's supporters should look before building any push.

For anyone supporting a finalist, the honest playbook is personal outreach: family group chats, coworkers, neighbors and local community pages, all pointed at the same ballot URL before the June close. That kind of organic push is what radio contests like this one are designed to reward.

How this ballot sits beside its New York neighbours

The Father Mows Best Contest is unusual among New York public votes in two ways. First, its vertical is not a city-by-city best-of ranking but a single-prize community award: one dad, one mower, one winner. Second, its publisher is a radio station rather than a magazine or a local news operation, which means the promotion is driven by on-air personalities, Clay, Dale and Liz, as much as by the ballot page itself.

That puts it in a different lane from the best-of ballots covering the state's larger markets. Best of Brooklyn, Best of Queens and Best of the Bronx each rank many businesses across many categories within one borough, while The City's Best, Best of New York City scales that idea to the five boroughs as a whole. Upstate and suburban readers have their own editions in Best of Hudson Valley and Best of Westchester.

What Buffalo's contest shares with those programs is the underlying mechanic: a public vote, open to anyone the publisher reaches, deciding an outcome the publisher then promotes. What separates it is scale and stakes. A best-of ballot spreads attention across dozens of winners; the Father Mows Best ballot concentrates everything on one family's Father's Day, which is exactly why a Buffalo listener's vote feels personal rather than procedural. For a supporter, the difference means a single well-timed push in June carries real weight here, where it would be a drop in a much larger bucket on a citywide best-of ballot.