Vote: Who is the Long Island High School Defensive Lineman of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

A single-award fan ballot, unlike the best-of contests around it

Shape is what separates this program from the New York ballots around it. The reader's-choice contests that share this state's list, Best of Brooklyn, Best of the Bronx, Best of Queens, The City's Best, Best of Hudson Valley and Best of Westchester, are business ballots: supporters sort local merchants, restaurants and services into category lists and vote across all of them. The Long Island High School Defensive Lineman of the Year vote runs the other way. It is a single award, decided entirely by public vote, and its subject is high school football rather than local commerce.

The ballot lives on Crowdsignal's poll.fm platform at the address poll.fm/16542983. Its audience is the Long Island high school football community: families, classmates, teammates and local fans deciding which junior or senior lineman takes the year's honor. The program name carries the market inside it, which is unusual; the sibling contests are named for boroughs and regions, while this ballot names the award itself.

Because the program is an athlete vote rather than a business directory, the facts that matter to a supporter are narrow: who is on the ballot, when the window shuts, and how the vote is cast. The table below collects those facts as they stand for the 2026 cycle.

The dated history: 2025 shut, 2026 closing in February

The program's edition history holds 2025 and 2026. The 2025 ballot has already ended; its page title reads Poll Closed, and it asked the same question under the 2025 label. The 2026 edition is the live cycle, and its published close is Wednesday, Feb. 4, 2026, with the cutoff set 11:59 p.m. Pacific (PT), a date the program's own high school sports coverage prints alongside the ballot.

The window itself sits in January: the 2026 ballot's span runs within that month up to the Feb. 4 close. What the program has not published is the exact opening day, and no rules text accompanies the ballot at all. Neither the ballot page nor the program's coverage states an opening date, a repeat-vote rule or an eligibility standard; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

The voting address has stayed on poll.fm across both editions, so the same link that served 2025 supporters serves the 2026 ballot. Recurrence points to a 2027 cycle next. Beyond the year, nothing about the next edition, its nominees or its close date has been printed, so the 2026 page is the reference point until a successor appears.

How a supporter casts a vote today

Voting here takes almost no technique. A supporter loads the poll.fm page, reads the nominee list, selects a lineman and submits. Each nominee appears with his school and his class, so a voter can find a specific player by scanning for the school name rather than the player alone. There is no nomination round on the page and no bracket or secondary stage; the single vote decides the award.

Nothing on the Long Island ballot page instructs a supporter to create an account, sign in or verify anything before voting, and nothing describes a daily return. That silence cuts both ways: it keeps the ballot simple, and it leaves the repeat-vote question unanswered on the page itself. Anybody hoping to vote repeatedly across the window has no published rule to consult.

Timing matters more than method here. The window ends 11:59 p.m. Pacific (PT), Feb. 4, 2026, and a vote cast after that moment has no effect on the 2026 result. The 2025 page shows what a shut ballot looks like: the question stays up, the Poll Closed label replaces the live form, and the answer set remains visible for anyone reading the outcome.

Where this ballot sits among New York's vote programs

Every sibling on the state's contest list is a best-of business program: Best of Brooklyn and Best of the Bronx run beside Best of Queens, The City's Best for New York City, Best of Hudson Valley and Best of Westchester. Each asks its market to vote for local businesses across a spread of categories, and each sits under a separate publisher with its own cycle. None of them touches high school sport.

This program is the odd ballot out, and that shapes how a supporter should treat it. A vote here is a vote for a teenager's season, not for a shop's year, so the audience is a school community rather than a customer base. The tactics that work in a business contest, where a merchant can ask every customer, translate only partly: a lineman's reach runs through teammates, families and the school's own channels.

For readers comparing New York ballots, the practical difference is scope. The borough and region programs run wide and shallow, many categories with a handful of nominees each; the Long Island lineman vote runs narrow and deep, a single award with the whole of its meaning attached to it. Links to the sibling programs sit below for anyone moving between the state's contests.

Building support before the February close

Support in this ballot is a sharing problem, not a strategy problem. The close arrives 11:59 p.m. Pacific (PT), Wednesday, Feb. 4, 2026, so every push has a hard edge. The channels that reach a high school football community are the team's own accounts, family group chats, the school's athletics page and local fan groups, and each share should carry the poll.fm address directly rather than a secondhand link.

The program publishes no policy on outside help, paid or otherwise, so the organizer's position on purchased support is unknown. For a general picture of what strengthening a fan-vote entry involves, see how to get more votes online, and for the award-ballot specifics see buying award votes. No vote package of any kind, from any seller, can guarantee a result in a fan vote; the organizer counts what its ballot counts, when its ballot closes.