For The Flyest Mask In Buffalo Gallery: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes and why the Flyest Mask ballot exists

The audience is the judge here. 93.7 WBLK, the Buffalo urban radio station that brands itself The People's Station, asks its listeners to send in photos of the face coverings they wear, posts those pictures in an online gallery, and then hands the whole decision to a public poll. The programme's full name, For The Flyest Mask In Buffalo Gallery, says exactly what it is: a style contest where Buffalo residents compete on how fly their masks look, and where the winner is chosen by YOU via the poll, as the station's own ballot page puts it.

That makes the ballot a community piece as much as a competition. It ran during a stretch when masks were part of daily life in western New York, and the station turned that shared habit into light entertainment for its morning-drive and midday audience. The Steve Harvey Morning Show, the on-air schedule and the station's local features all sit around the ballot on wblk.com, so a listener who lands on the vote page is already inside the station's world rather than on a neutral third-party platform.

The host is the station itself. There is no outside balloting vendor in this programme; the poll lives on wblk.com at wblk.com/vote-for-the-flyest-mask-in-buffalo-gallery/, which is the address a supporter uses to reach the gallery and cast a vote. In vertical terms it is a best-of programme, in mechanic terms a public vote, and in market terms it belongs to Buffalo, New York.

The dated run: which editions are confirmed and when the 2020 window closed

The ballot page on wblk.com has been live in five separate years: 2020, 2021, 2024, 2025 and 2026. Those five years are the editions on file for this programme, and they show a contest that came back after a gap rather than a strictly unbroken streak. The next expected cycle is 2027, though WBLK has not announced that return in advance.

The clearest dated picture comes from the 2020 cycle, where the station ran a two-step sequence. First came the entry round: listeners could submit their Mask On! selfie from now through Sunday, September 20th by 8 pm, through the companion page at wblk.com/show-us-your-flyest-mask-and-enter-to-win-150-in-gift-cards/. Once the pics were in, the gallery opened and the station wrote that voting is open from now through Sunday, September 27th at 8 pm. So the 2020 cycle moved from a week of selfie submissions straight into a public vote that closed on the last Sunday of September at 8 in the evening.

What the station has not published for any cycle is the makeup of the gallery itself: the list of mask styles or the finalists that appear on the ballot; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Later editions are thinner on detail. The 2021, 2024, 2025 and 2026 runs are confirmed by the ballot page existing in those years, but WBLK has not printed opening or closing dates for any of them, so the September 2020 window is the only fully dated cycle on file for this programme, and any fresh dates will show up on the ballot page itself.

How a supporter votes in the Flyest Mask poll today

The design is deliberately simple, since the whole point is audience participation. A supporter heads to the ballot page at wblk.com, scrolls the gallery of mask photos that listeners submitted, picks the covering they find the flyest, and casts a vote through the poll embedded on the page. No account, no fee and no third-party login sit in front of the vote; the poll is the station's own, and anyone reaching the page can take part.

The stated limit in the 2020 cycle was that you can vote once per hour. That single rule shapes the whole strategy of the contest: a supporter who wants a particular mask to win does not vote harder, they vote longer, coming back at the top of every hour while the window remains open. In 2020 that window ran from the moment the gallery went live through Sunday, September 27th at 8 pm, which gave committed fans a stretch of hourly returns to work with.

Because the gallery is made of listener selfies, the social side matters as much as the poll. The people in the photos push their own entries to friends and family, and the station's audience does the rest. Anyone planning a serious push should read the ballot page first, since the hourly rule and the closing time for the current cycle are printed there when the vote is live, and the station has not committed to keeping the once-per-hour limit in every future edition.

Where this ballot sits among New York's best-of votes

Public-vote programmes are thick on the ground across New York, and most of them are city or region wide reader polls run by publications. Closest neighbours here include Best of Brooklyn, Best of Hudson Valley, The City's Best, Best of New York City, Best of Queens, Best of the Bronx and Best of Westchester. Each of those covers a metro area or a county with a broad slate of local businesses and services, with a separate publisher behind every one of them.

The Flyest Mask ballot is a different animal. It is not a citywide best-of directory; it is a single-category style contest run by a radio station for its own Buffalo audience, built around listener-submitted photos rather than nominated businesses. Where the Brooklyn or Queens ballots ask readers to pick a favourite in dozens of everyday categories, WBLK's programme asks one question about one gallery of masks, and the people competing are the station's own listeners rather than local merchants.

That difference changes how support works too. A broad best-of poll rewards a business that can mobilise customers across many categories at once, while this ballot rewards a single photo with a committed circle of friends returning every hour. It also means the competition pool is small and personal: you are up against a handful of neighbours' selfies, not a city's worth of shops. For anyone comparing New York public votes, this is the radio-station end of the spectrum, and the Buffalo market has no other programme quite like it on this site.

Strengthening support for a mask entry in this ballot

Support in this programme comes down to the hourly clock. Since the stated rule in the station's cycle was one vote per supporter per hour, the strongest thing a mask's backer can do is organise returns: set reminders, tell friends the closing time, and keep the circle coming back through the whole window rather than voting once and leaving. A gallery of a handful of selfies means a small, consistent group of hourly voters can carry an entry a long way.

Sharing does the rest. The photos belong to real Buffalo listeners, so each entry travels through its own friend group, family chats and social feeds. WBLK's stated position on outside help is simply the poll's own rule set: votes cast through the page count, and the station has published no allowance for automated voting tools, so anything beyond normal human clicking sits outside what the ballot describes. For readers weighing a paid boost, our votes guide and the legality page lay out the general picture, and our guide to earning more votes covers the organic plays that fit an hourly ballot like this one. Nothing any outside provider does can promise a win in a poll the station itself tallies.