Best of Homer 2025: How Voting Works & How to Win

Homer News runs one ballot: what's confirmed about Best of Homer

Homer News, the weekly newspaper serving Homer, Alaska, organizes Best of Homer and hosts it on Second Street's platform rather than on its own domain. The address is homernews2.secondstreetapp.com, and the ballot itself combines nominating a business and voting for it on one page instead of running two separate rounds.

Four editions are confirmed so far: 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026. Homer News's coverage of the 2025 results traces the feature to a 2023 start, which makes Best of Homer a comparatively young addition to the newspaper's lineup rather than a fixture with decades behind it.

Homer News prints the results, not just the ballot: the 2025 round was written up in the newspaper's own December edition, tying the online vote back to the print product that carries the Best of Homer name.

Four editions on record, and what stays off the page between them

2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026 are the four years Best of Homer has confirmed so far, with the ballot itself pointing back to a 2023 beginning. That gives Homer News a short but unbroken-looking run rather than a single trial year, and the 2025 round is where Best of Homer's calendar turns specific: September 19 through October 27, combining nominations and voting rather than splitting them into two separate stages.

What Homer News does not print is just as consistent across those four years. No category roster sits anywhere on the confirmed ballot, so a business cannot check in advance which group its nomination will land in. No per-voter limit or eligibility rule appears either. The ballot page keeps both details off the page and confirm on the live ballot each cycle is the only reliable way to close that gap before a campaign starts.

A newspaper-run Second Street ballot like this one typically republishes on a similar calendar each year, but Best of Homer's own four-year history is still too short to call that a fixed September start with certainty. September 19 is what the 2025 cycle confirms; whether the next one lands on the same week is not yet printed anywhere on homernews2.secondstreetapp.com.

Casting a vote on Best of Homer, step by step

The mechanic on Best of Homer is a single Second Street ballot page that carries both stages of the process. A supporter opens homernews2.secondstreetapp.com, finds the business by name, and casts a vote directly there, without a separate nomination form to fill out first and a separate voting form to return to later.

Because Homer News prints no category list, there is no menu to browse before voting. A business is entered and found under whatever name Homer News already uses for it in the newspaper, which is also the safest way to avoid a nomination getting lost under a slightly different spelling.

Homer News has not published a per-voter frequency rule for Best of Homer, whether a vote resets daily, or what counts as an eligible voter for this particular ballot. A campaign that assumes a number never printed here is a campaign built on a guess, and the fix stays the same every cycle: confirm on the live ballot each cycle rather than repeating whatever cap a different Alaska newspaper's ballot happens to use.

Where Best of Homer sits among Alaska's other reader ballots

Alaska carries several separate readers'-choice ballots, and Best of Homer is the only one on this list that answers to a single city's newspaper rather than a statewide or regional publisher.

None of those six share a ballot, a judging pool or a results page with Best of Homer. A strong showing on Homer News's own ballot carries no weight toward any statewide count, and a business chasing recognition across several Alaska ballots at once is running separate campaigns under separate rules, not one combined push.

Building support for a Homer nomination before the ballot closes

With four editions behind it and no published vote cap, the most direct way to build real support on Best of Homer is asking actual Homer customers to visit homernews2.secondstreetapp.com and vote, then asking them again closer to the close date rather than once at the start. Homer News's own ballot never explains how it treats outside vote-promotion help, which means a campaign has to lean on the platform's general terms rather than a rule specific to this page.

A last-minute rush of activity on a ballot that has run only four cycles is easier to notice than the same rush would be on a program with decades of history behind it. Business readers'-choice vote support lays out what that kind of push looks like for a ballot shaped like Best of Homer's own.