Offices Performance And Communication Arts Annual Public Speaking Contest: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the contest is and who runs it

The Annual Public Speaking Contest belongs to St. Lawrence University, a university whose campus sits at 23 Romoda Dr. in Canton, New York. It is run by the Performance and Communication Arts Department, which hosts the contest page on the university's own website at stlawu.edu. That page is the department's single authoritative address for the program: it carries the current edition's details, and questions about the contest go to the Public Speaking Contest director, Dr. Ashley Rife, at [email protected].

The program is a speech competition with a public-vote element, not a business listing ballot. University speakers deliver addresses at a fall final, expert judges score those speeches for the judged places, and the audience present in the room chooses an Audience Choice Winner. That makes the contest unusual among New York public votes: the ballot is not a webpage form open to anybody with a browser, it is a room in Canton on a specific evening. A supporter who is not present has no way to take part in the audience vote at all.

The fixed facts about the program are gathered in one place below.

Edition history and the fall window

The contest is annual, and its short published history is easy to state. The department's page labels the Fall 2024 edition the 2nd Annual Public Speaking Contest and the Fall 2025 edition the 3rd Annual Public Speaking Contest, and the edition years on file cover 2024, 2025 and 2026. Each cycle sits inside the fall semester, which is why the window for the most recent confirmed edition ran from September through November of 2025.

What the department has not printed matters as much as what it has. The contest page does not publish a speaker roster for the fall final or a rule on how many ballots a person in the audience may cast; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The exact date of the final inside the September-to-November window is likewise not printed in advance, and neither is a nomination or entry deadline for speakers who want to compete. Those gaps are normal for a department-run academic event, where the audience is reached through campus channels rather than through a public voting site.

Because the program is young, the safest habit is to treat the department page as the calendar. Whatever the 4th Annual announces, it will appear there before anywhere else, and past finalist lists on the same page show the department does publish results once an edition concludes.

How a supporter votes at the fall final

The mechanic is literal and physical. The department states that those in attendance will vote for an Audience Choice Winner, so the ballot exists only for people sitting in the room when the final is held on the Canton campus. There is no described online form, no remote option and no link to click from home. A supporter's job is to be present, listen to the speeches, and mark the audience choice when the host calls for it, following whatever collection procedure the department uses that evening.

The same event decides the judged prizes. Expert judges award 1st place ($300) and 2nd place ($100), while the audience in attendance decides the Audience Choice Winner ($200). A speaker is therefore competing for the judges and for the crowd at the same time, and the two outcomes can easily differ, since judges score delivery and argument while the crowd votes on the performance that landed best in the room.

Because the vote is in person, the usual online vote-building tactics do not transfer. What transfers is turnout: a speaker whose supporters actually fill seats in Canton holds an advantage that no amount of online activity can substitute for. The department has not published a per-attendee ballot rule, so the procedure announced at the event governs how many choices each person present may mark.

How this ballot sits beside its New York neighbours

New York readers arriving from other public-vote pages will find this contest behaves differently from the state's best-of ballots. The state's better-known programs, such as Best of Brooklyn, Best of Queens and Best of the Bronx, run as city or borough reader ballots where businesses compete across many categories and supporters vote from a browser. Best of Hudson Valley, The City's Best and Best of Westchester follow the same publication-driven shape.

The St. Lawrence contest shares none of that structure. It is an academic event run by a university department, its ballot is the audience in a room, its competitors are student speakers rather than businesses, and its prizes are cash awards decided at a single final. There is no category roster to browse and no nomination form for the general public to fill in.

That difference matters for anybody researching New York public votes. A tactic that works on a borough best-of ballot, where supporters can vote daily from anywhere, has no purchase here, because the constraint is physical presence in Canton during the fall final. Conversely, the contest's university provenance gives it a transparency that many reader ballots lack: a named department, a named director and published finalist lists on the organizer's own domain.

Helping a speaker win the Audience Choice vote

For a competing speaker, the winnable prize is usually the Audience Choice Winner ($200), because it depends on the room rather than on the judges. The practical playbook is turnout: invite friends, family and classmates who will genuinely attend the fall final in Canton, make sure they stay for the audience vote, and brief them on which speech to mark. The department has not printed any position on outside assistance, so its contest page and the contest director are the right places to confirm what support is permitted before organizing anything larger.

Speakers looking for general preparation material can read how to get more votes online for tactics that apply to open web ballots, and buying award votes explains how purchased support works for contests that run online ballots. Neither transfers directly to an in-room vote, where presence is the whole game.