BEK TV Best Local TV Station / Best TV Personality: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes and why this North Dakota TV ballot exists

BEK TV is a broadcaster with an unusual relationship to its audience: it is part of BEK Communications Cooperative, a North Dakota cooperative whose members are also its customers and its viewers. That structure shapes the Best Local TV Station / Best TV Personality ballot, because the people voting are not strangers to the organization. They watch the programming, they may receive cooperative services, and the station treats their votes as a direct measure of local goodwill. The ballot is a public-vote best-of contest, carried on the BEK Beacon page at bek.coop/beacon, and it asks viewers to name BEK TV the Best Local TV Station and to support its on-air personalities in the Best TV Personality round.

The station campaigns on these results openly. Its Beacon posts celebrate each win, ask viewers to "make us a Five-Time winner," and frame voting as something the community does for the station rather than something the station does for itself. For a supporter, that means the ballot is low-friction and personal: you are voting for people and a station you already know, not for an abstract brand.

The dated record: editions, the 2026 round and the August window

The most recent dated milestone is from July 2026. A Beacon post titled "Six Times and Counting" announced that BEK TV is nominated for the sixth year in a row, and that two hosts move on to the voting round, with voting opens July 22 as the stated start. The station's August 2026 post called that effort its biggest Best of the Best nomination ever and credited viewers for it.

The year before, the voting instructions pointed to an August 2025 window running from August 1 through August 31, with a "vote twice daily now through Aug. 13" push inside it. Confirmed editions of the ballot span 2023 through 2026. BEK TV's viewer-voted history reaches back further through separate recognition: it is the 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 winner of the Bismarck Tribune's Best of the Best contest for Best Local TV Station, selected by the people.

The station's voting instructions leave the exact opening and closing days of the current round unstated, along with any eligibility condition for voters; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Everything else above comes from the station's own dated posts.

How a supporter votes: the twice-daily routine

The mechanic on this ballot is unusually simple and unusually demanding at the same time. BEK TV's voting posts state the rule plainly: voting is quick and easy, and you can do it twice every day until the contest closes, once online and once by text. That means one supporter who returns daily across the voting window contributes two votes per day, every day, which is why the station's posts push the daily habit rather than a one-time visit.

Concretely, a supporter opens the BEK Beacon page at bek.coop, follows the current round's instructions to cast the online vote for Best Local TV Station and, where listed, the nominated hosts for Best TV Personality, then casts the second vote of the day by text. The text instructions for the live round are printed on the Beacon page itself. There is no registration step, no login and no write-in box described in the station's voting posts; the format is a straight pick from the ballot as published.

Because the daily pair is the only constraint the station states, the strategy that matches the ballot is consistency: remind your household, your coworkers and your social circle every day the round is open, and use both the online and the text channel each day.

Where this ballot sits among North Dakota's best-of contests

North Dakota readers who follow one public-vote ballot usually meet several, and BEK TV's push sits inside a busy local field. The Bismarck Tribune Best of the Best contest is the one BEK TV has historically won, taking Best Local TV Station every year from 2021 through 2025, selected by the people. The station's own Beacon posts have directed viewers toward that ballot during nomination phases, which makes the Tribune contest a close neighbor of this program even though the two have different organizers.

The CommunityVotes family also runs North Dakota markets: CommunityVotes Bismarck, CommunityVotes Fargo, CommunityVotes Grand Forks and CommunityVotes Minot each cover a city under its own publisher. A broader Best of the Best - Best of the Midwest ballot rounds out the state's field.

What separates the BEK TV ballot from all of these is who campaigns on it. Here the organizer is also the nominee: BEK TV runs a Beacon page that asks viewers to vote for BEK TV itself and its hosts, publishes the voting instructions, and celebrates the results. In the Tribune and CommunityVotes contests, the station appears as one entry among many businesses.

Strengthening support for BEK TV in this ballot

Because this ballot's mechanic is a fixed twice-daily pair, effective support is built on rhythm, not bursts. A voting round opened July 22 in the most recent cycle, and the station's own past instructions have run pushes such as voting twice daily through Aug. 13, so the window a supporter has to work with is measured in weeks. The tactics that fit it are a daily reminder to a willing group, using both the online vote and the text vote each day, and asking people again more than once across the round, since a single ask rarely converts into a daily habit.

BEK TV's posts carry no statement about outside vote support for this ballot, and its only stated constraint is the two-votes-per-day format that its own posts celebrate. That silence means anyone arranging broader support should read the live Beacon instructions first and stay inside whatever the current round prints. For a fuller treatment of how supporters strengthen a community ballot without stepping outside the published rules, see our votes guide, and for the legal question behind paid support, is buying votes legal covers the ground directly.