Now For The Lite Listener Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Lite Listener Choice Awards is and who runs it

Now For The Lite Listener Choice Awards is the annual best-of ballot of WLZW, a radio station serving Central New York, New York, and broadcasting on air as Lite 98.7. The station brands itself as the Best Variety of the 80's Through Today, and the awards are an extension of that listener relationship: the ballot page addresses its audience directly with the line vote to determine the Best of in Central New York, and tells them plainly that they determine the results. No external contest company appears anywhere in the setup. The vote lives at lite987.com/vote-now-for-the-lite-listener-choice-awards/, a page the station controls directly, which means the same publisher that programs the music also hosts and counts the vote.

The vertical is a familiar one for radio. Stations across the country run listener choice ballots because they reward local businesses their audiences already use, and the prompts on this page fit that pattern: pizza, chicken wings, ice cream, coffee, an entertainment venue and other everyday favorites around Central New York. The phrase Now For in the program's name is the station's own call to action, pointing listeners at a round that is open at the moment they land on the page.

Program facts at a glance

The dated record: which editions are confirmed and when the window falls

The ballot has a longer confirmed history than most radio promotions of its kind. Confirmed editions appear from 2021 through 2026, six years running on the same address at lite987.com, without a single skipped cycle in that span. A promotion that returns on the same page for six straight years is an annual fixture of the station's schedule, not a one-time campaign, and the 2026 round is the most recent confirmed edition. Nothing in the station's published text commits to a month pattern for 2027.

The clearest timing fact comes from the page's own promotion: voting begins now, and continues until Thursday, February 11th, with the station's on-air hosts, Naomi and Matt, named as the people who will announce the outcome. The date carries no year in the printed text, so it belongs to whichever cycle was live when the page was published, and it is the only closing date the ballot has ever printed.

What the page does not carry matters just as much for anyone planning a push around the ballot. WLZW prints no complete category roster, no statement of how many times one listener may vote, no eligibility terms, and no exact dates showing when the round opens and closes; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The prompts visible in the page's text, including Best Pizza in Central New York and Best Chicken Wings in Central New York, are the phrases the page itself carries, and the station has never framed them as the full list.

How a supporter votes on the Lite 98.7 ballot today

The mechanic is the simplest one in public voting: go to the station's page and pick favorites. A supporter opens lite987.com/vote-now-for-the-lite-listener-choice-awards/ in a browser, scrolls through the best-of prompts for Central New York, and selects or types a favorite in each category where they hold an opinion. Because the ballot is served from lite987.com itself, with no third-party contest software in the path, there is no platform dashboard to register for and no separate nomination round named anywhere on the page. The station's instruction to its audience is direct, vote NOW, and its framing of the stakes is direct too: you determine the results.

Two practical points follow from the station's silence on rules. First, the page does not state whether a listener may come back day after day, so anyone planning repeat visits should follow whatever the live form allows at the moment they submit. Second, the page names no login, email gate or registration step, but it does not promise a friction-free ballot either. The form on the live page is the authority for both questions in the current cycle, and it can change between editions without notice. A supporter who reaches the ballot through the station's own navigation, via the vote link on lite987.com, will always land on the round that is actually open rather than a stale address.

How this ballot sits beside New York's other best-of votes

New York has no shortage of best-of ballots, but most of the well-known ones are city and regional magazine formats. Sibling programs on this site include Best of Brooklyn, Best of Hudson Valley, Best of New York City, Best of Queens, Best of the Bronx and Best of Westchester. Each of those answers to a publication anchored in its own borough or county, and each runs its ballot on a scale shaped by its readership.

The Lite Listener Choice Awards is different in three ways. It belongs to a radio station rather than a magazine, so its promotion happens on air through hosts like Naomi and Matt instead of through print or a magazine website. Its market is Central New York as a region rather than a single city, which puts everyday food and venue prompts such as chicken riggies and tasting water at the center of the ballot, categories that reflect upstate tastes rather than downstate ones. And the whole thing is hosted on lite987.com, the publisher's own domain, while many magazine ballots run on third-party contest software. For a business named in a prompt, that combination means the audience is defined by who listens to Lite 98.7, and the fastest path to support runs through that audience rather than through a metro-area readership.

Strengthening support in a radio listener ballot

Support in this ballot comes from listeners who actually reach the lite987.com form and submit, so the work for a named business is getting its own customers onto that page during the round. A radio listener vote rewards businesses whose regulars already identify with the station: a pizza shop or coffee roaster named in a prompt can ask every customer at the counter, post the ballot link on its own social channels, and remind people while the round is open, since the station's printed close date, Thursday, February 11th, gives the push a deadline. The station publishes no rule about outside help of any kind, so nothing on the page either permits or prohibits organized voting beyond ordinary listener participation. Tactics worth copying are collected in a guide to earning more votes, and buyers weighing paid support against organic outreach can compare both on the award votes page before deciding.