WKTV Boo-ti-ful Costume Contest 2025: How Voting Works & How to Win

The gap entrants face with the WKTV Boo-ti-ful Costume Contest

Every autumn, costume shops, families and groups around Utica face the same practical problem with the WKTV Boo-ti-ful Costume Contest: the ballot tells you almost nothing about how the competition is structured before you are already in it. WKTV runs the program as a Halloween costume photo vote on Second Street, but the page for the 2025 edition, which opened on October 6 and closed on October 31, carries no list of categories and no printed rule on how many votes one person may cast.

That matters in a very concrete way. A person who wants to organise support for a costume entry, whether that is a family group, a workplace team or a local business, has to plan around rules they cannot read in advance. How entries are grouped, whether there are divisions by age or by group size, and whether a single visitor can return day after day, are all questions the ballot does not answer; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

The honest position for anyone entering is therefore simple. The contest itself is well established, with eight confirmed editions behind it, and the voting mechanic is a straightforward public photo vote. What is missing is paperwork. WKTV is a television station with an annual promotions calendar, and the costume contest sits among photo galleries and sweepstakes on the same Second Street account, but the station has not put a category list or a supporter rule sheet beside the ballot. The live page is the one rule text worth trusting for any given October.

Who runs the contest, where it sits and what it is

WKTV runs the Boo-ti-ful Costume Contest. WKTV is a television station whose registered home is Utica, New York, listed at an address on Smith Hill Road, and its website is wktv.com. Second Street, the promotions platform behind the station's other interactive items, hosts the vote at the address wktv.secondstreetapp.com. The contest sits in the best-of family of public votes rather than in the sweepstakes family: it is a vote on submitted material, decided by supporters, not a random draw or a paid giveaway.

The contest's full name for the current cycle is the WKTV Boo-ti-ful Costume Contest 2025, and each edition carries its year in the title and in the ballot address, which makes it easy to tell cycles apart. No fee stands between a supporter and the ballot. The ballot type on Second Street is a user-generated photo vote, which means the entries are photographs of costumes submitted through the platform and the winner is decided by supporters clicking through and voting for the photos they prefer.

Program facts

Because the station is the organizer, the contest inherits the audience of WKTV's local news coverage in the Utica area. That is the practical reach of the ballot: Halloween voters who already follow the station and its website. For comparison, the state's larger best-of ballots, such as The City's Best in New York City, answer to different publishers and far larger markets, but the costume contest answers only to WKTV and its own October calendar.

Dated facts: editions and the October window

Eight editions of the Boo-ti-ful Costume Contest are confirmed, running each October from 2018 through 2025 without a break. The first two of those ran under an earlier ballot address before the yearly URL pattern settled in, and every edition since 2020 has carried the year in its own Second Street page. The run is unbroken across eight consecutive years, which is what makes this an annual program rather than a promotion WKTV revived occasionally.

The 2025 window is the sharpest dated fact here: it opened on October 6 and closed on October 31. That window is over, and the edition is closed, so no vote cast now counts toward the 2025 result. The earliest edition in the confirmed run began on October 15, 2018, and every confirmed edition has lived inside October. The pattern is clear enough that anyone planning for the next cycle can budget for a Halloween-season window, but a future edition's open and close dates are only fixed when WKTV publishes the new ballot.

What the published history does not contain matters as much as what it does. No edition has carried a category list, and no rule on vote frequency or supporter eligibility is printed on the ballot page; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Nothing in the confirmed run suggests the contest has ever charged for voting, and the ballot type has stayed the same photo-vote format throughout. If the next edition follows the pattern, WKTV will put it live at a new yearly address under its Second Street presence sometime before Halloween, and the window will run the length of the month.

How a supporter votes on the ballot today

The mechanic is the plain one Second Street uses for photo votes. During a live cycle, the supporter loads the ballot for the current year, in 2025 that was wktv.secondstreetapp.com/WKTV-Boo-ti-ful-Costume-Contest-2025, and the page presents the submitted costume photographs. Voting is a click on the entry a supporter favours. There is no account hurdle described on the ballot, no fee and no separate nomination round published; the photo gallery and the vote sit on the same page for the length of the window.

Because the 2025 window closed on October 31, a supporter arriving today will find the current edition closed rather than live. The action for a supporter during a live edition is simple: browse the photos, pick an entry, vote, and come back while the window is open if the ballot permits repeat visits. That last part is the one thing the page does not specify. WKTV has not printed any cap on repeat visits, so nobody can say from the published material whether one person may vote once, once a day or freely; the ballot itself is where that rule would appear.

Supporters should also be aware of the yearly address. Each edition lives at its own URL with the year in the path, so a bookmark from last October will not follow the contest into the next cycle. The reliable route is the Second Street home for WKTV's promotions, where the current edition's page sits alongside the station's other items. Anyone wanting general technique rather than this ballot's specifics can read the guide at this site's votes guide, and the legality guide covers the rules question in plain terms.

Winning support in a Utica Halloween photo vote

Support in this contest is won or lost in a very short window: the whole of October. The 2025 edition opened on October 6 and closed on Halloween, so an entry that waits until the last few days has compressed whatever push it plans into a fraction of the ballot's life. Because WKTV's audience is local to Utica, the reach that matters is the station's own community, and the most effective free tactic is a shareable direct link to the entry, passed through the channels a Utica costume entrant actually has: workplace chat, neighbourhood groups and family networks.

The organizer's rules are the frame around all of it, and here the honest gap applies again: no rule sheet on vote frequency or outside help is published with the ballot; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. That is why reading the live page before any push matters more for this contest than for a program with printed rules. Where an organizer has stated a policy, the ballot's terms govern, and an entry that breaches them loses more than votes.

For people weighing purchased support, the practical points are the ones on this site's own pages: the overview at buying votes online explains how purchases work generally, and award votes covers ballots of this shape. Nobody can promise a result, and the station's ballot terms always come first. What remains true regardless is that a costume photo with genuine local visibility, pushed steadily across the full window, has the simplest path in a community vote of this size.

How this ballot sits beside its New York neighbours

Within the Second Street presence WKTV keeps, the costume contest is the Halloween-season item in a mixed calendar. The account also carries a Weather Photos gallery, a Submit News Photo/Video page for viewers sending the station material, an 18 Facets of Summer Photo Contest, a Back to School Giveaway series and a sweepstakes promotion for late 2026. The costume contest is the only one of those built around a public vote on a single seasonal theme, which is why it behaves more like a best-of ballot than like the sweepstakes beside it.

Across New York State, the page links to six sibling best-of programs that answer to other publishers: Best of Brooklyn, Best of Hudson Valley, The City's Best in New York City, Best of Queens, Best of the Bronx and Best of Westchester. Those ballots cover city and county business categories with their own publishers and calendars. The costume contest is different in almost every dimension: a single seasonal theme, a photo-vote format, a station audience in Utica and an October window.

That difference is the reason it earns its own page. A supporter searching for a Utica Halloween vote will not find it on the metropolitan best-of ballots, and a business reading those pages should not import their rules here. Every one of those ballots runs under a separate publisher, and this one's rules live on the WKTV ballot itself.