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

Eight confirmed Octobers, and the one date nobody has posted for 2026

Eight. That is how many confirmed editions the WKTV Boo-ti-ful Costume Contest has behind it, one every fall from 2018 through 2025, each one run on the same wktv.secondstreetapp.com address through the Second Street voting platform. A run that long puts this contest ahead of plenty of local station promotions that surface once and disappear.

WKTV organizes the program directly rather than farming it out to an outside sponsor, and the platform listing keeps every edition on one consistent host. The most recent one opened October 6, 2025 and closed October 31, 2025, a window that has already ended. Nothing dated for a 2026 posting has gone up on that address yet.

Treat that last row honestly: this contest's eight-year run is real, but how many categories run, and how often one person may vote, is not stated anywhere the platform publishes; confirm on the live ballot each cycle before promising either one to a supporter.

A single station's costume vote, not one of New York's business 'best of' ballots

Six other New York public-vote programs share a state and a readers'-choice flavor with WKTV's contest, and every one of them is a separate operation. Best of Brooklyn, Best of Hudson Valley, The City's Best - Best of New York City, Best of Queens, Best of the Bronx and Best of Westchester all run business-award ballots for their own regional publishers. None of the six has any connection to WKTV, to Second Street, or to a costume contest of any kind.

A costume entrant searching for WKTV's ballot has no reason to land on any of those six, and a business chasing a readers'-choice nomination has no reason to land on WKTV's page either. Whichever one someone actually needs, typing the exact wktv.secondstreetapp.com address is a safer bet than trusting whatever a general search turns up first, since a name this specific does not overlap with a single one of the six business ballots above.

A New York State address, without one home city attached

New York's television-station listings place WKTV in the state without narrowing to one city or county, and the confirmed contest page does not fill that gap either. Other New York public-vote programs point to a specific metro; WKTV's own listing confirms only the state.

Practically, that means the contest's own page is what actually defines who can enter and who can vote, not a city boundary drawn from outside it. A New York supporter anywhere the station reaches has as much claim to the WKTV Boo-ti-ful Costume Contest as one in whatever town WKTV broadcasts from, since nothing published narrows the circle past the state line.

That gap covers geography only. It says nothing about the contest's own eight-year run, which stayed on the identical wktv.secondstreetapp.com address every October from 2018 through 2025, or about whether a 2026 edition eventually follows the same pattern; confirm that particular question on the live ballot each cycle rather than assuming the string of Octobers continues automatically.

Building support around a pattern, not a promise

Eight straight Octobers is a pattern, not a guarantee that a ninth follows on schedule. Until wktv.secondstreetapp.com actually posts a 2026 window, the honest move for a supporter is watching that address directly rather than acting on a date nobody has published.

Once a new window does open, the same approach that carried the previous eight editions still applies: ask real people, more than once, instead of counting on one late burst of clicks. Every Second Street market gets watched for irregular activity, and getting flagged on a program with eight years of history behind it carries a steeper cost than the identical mistake would on a contest running its first year.

Getting entered is one claim; who actually wins is a separate call WKTV alone makes once the voting window shuts. Is buying votes legal walks through the boundary between a safe push and a reckless one, worth a look before spending real effort chasing a ninth WKTV edition. Buying votes online explains the shape outside help usually takes for a photo-vote format like this one, and award-vote campaign planning fits the same playbook onto a station-run ballot. For turning casual supporters into repeat voters, building real momentum for an online ballot covers the mechanics directly.