2025 Courier Cares Christmas Lighting Contest: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes in the Courier Cares Christmas Lighting Contest and why it exists

The 2025 Courier Cares Christmas Lighting Contest is a seasonal community ballot run by Prescott Daily Courier, the daily newspaper of Prescott, Arizona. Its audience is the Courier's own readership: residents of Prescott and the surrounding area who drive past the light displays every December and enjoy settling the question of which ones shine brightest. The Courier Cares name signals the publisher's intent. This is not a national sweepstakes that happens to mention Arizona. It is a hometown program built around the displays its own community creates, and the people qualified to judge them are the people who live alongside them.

Second Street hosts the ballot, and its app domain, dcourier.secondstreetapp.com, carries all of the Courier's interactive promotions. Second Street is the same platform behind thousands of newspaper-run ballots across the country, which matters for a supporter in two ways. The voting interface is familiar and dependable, and each promotion the Courier runs gets its own dedicated page rather than sharing a single crowded ballot.

The promotion is registered as a photo voting format, meaning the lighting displays appear as pictured entries. That single detail shapes the whole experience of the ballot. Supporters are not choosing between names on a list. They are looking at photographs of actual homes and displays in their own community, which is why the contest rewards entries that photograph well and why the audience skews toward neighbours who recognize what they are looking at.

The dated facts behind the Courier Cares Christmas Lighting Contest

Two editions of the Courier Cares Christmas Lighting Contest are confirmed: 2024 and 2025. Each ran on its own year-specific page within the Courier's Second Street domain, so the 2024 ballot and the 2025 ballot have separate addresses even though they belong to the same program. The 2025 cycle is the most recent confirmed run, and 2024 is the first year the promotion is known to have operated. Nothing earlier than 2024 has been published under the Courier Cares lighting name.

Voting in the confirmed 2025 cycle ran from November 28 through December 20, 2025. That span covers the heart of the holiday lighting season in Prescott, opening right after the American Thanksgiving weekend and closing with just days left before Christmas. The promotion is now closed, and its page remains online from that run. The 2024 edition's own window dates have not been published in what the publisher has released, so its schedule is known only by its year.

Prescott Daily Courier has not printed the ballot's category list, its repeat-visit rule, or its entrant eligibility terms; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The publisher has likewise not announced a 2026 edition. Given that the program has now run in two consecutive years, a third run would fit the pattern, but the dates of any future window are the publisher's to announce and nothing on this page should be read as a schedule.

One practical consequence follows from the two-year history. Because each edition lives at its own address, a supporter searching for the contest should match the address to the year they intend to vote in. The 2025 address is the current confirmed ballot, and any later edition would presumably follow the same naming pattern the first two years established.

How a supporter votes on the Courier Cares Christmas Lighting Contest ballot

Voting in this program is an online-only act performed on the Second Street ballot at the Courier's app domain. A supporter opens the 2025 Courier Cares Christmas Lighting Contest page, browses the entries, and submits choices for the displays they want to see recognized. Because the promotion is a photo voting format, the browsing step is visual: each lighting display appears as a pictured entry, and the supporter's judgement is applied to what the photographs show rather than to a text list of names.

The submission step follows the standard Second Street flow. The ballot presents the entries, the supporter marks their selections, and the page walks them through confirmation. If the promotion requires an email or an account sign-in before accepting votes, that requirement appears on the ballot itself at the point of submission. Prescott Daily Courier has not published the sign-in requirement, the frequency rule, or any eligibility screening in advance, so only the live ballot itself can say what a supporter must supply for a vote to count.

Timing matters in a window like this one. The 2025 ballot was open for a fixed span ending December 20, and votes submitted outside that span had nowhere to land. Anyone who puts voting off until the closing days of a window risks losing the chance to participate entirely if a technical problem or a sign-in hiccup eats the deadline. Voting early in the window, then returning if the ballot's rules allow repeat visits, is the pattern that fits a fixed-date promotion of this kind.

Nothing about the mechanic requires payment. Using the ballot costs nothing, and it is open to the community the Courier serves, with paidVoting false for this program. Any cost a supporter might encounter elsewhere in the Courier's promotion lineup, such as its sweepstakes, belongs to those promotions and not to this ballot.

How the Courier Cares ballot sits beside its Arizona neighbours

Prescott Daily Courier's lighting contest sits among several public-vote programs running in Arizona, and its character is easiest to see in contrast. The CommunityVotes Buckeye, CommunityVotes Chandler, CommunityVotes Gilbert, and CommunityVotes Tempe ballots are city-wide best-of programs: broad ballots covering many business and service categories across a whole municipality, each answering to its own city's market rather than to a single publisher's seasonal theme.

The Arizona Daily Star Readers' Choice ballot is the closest structural cousin, because both programs are run by a daily newspaper on a contest platform for their local readership. But the Daily Star's program is a general readers' choice covering many categories, while the Courier Cares lighting contest is narrow by design: one subject, one season, one community. The Experience AZ ballot takes the widest view of all, addressing the state as a whole rather than a single city's holiday displays.

Three traits set the Courier Cares program apart from every ballot above. First, its subject is decorative rather than commercial: it celebrates lighting displays, not businesses, which changes who enters and who cares about the result. Second, its format is photographic, so the ballot is a gallery as much as a list. Third, its calendar is seasonal and short, a fixed window in late November and December, where the best-of ballots typically run on broader annual cycles. A Prescott supporter interested in the wider Arizona voting scene can use the sibling ballots above, but none of them substitutes for the Courier's own December ballot.

Strengthening support for a Courier Cares lighting entry

An entrant in this ballot works with a short, fixed window and a visual format, so effective support is built around both. The photograph is the entry's face: supporters browsing the ballot choose from pictured displays, so an entry that is well lit and clearly photographed at night presents itself better than one that is hard to make out. Sharing the entry's direct link with Prescott friends, family, and neighbourhood groups is the most direct legitimate lever, because every click that lands on the ballot is a potential vote during the open window.

Where outside help is concerned, the organizer's published position sets the limit. Prescott Daily Courier has not printed contest terms addressing purchased votes or voting software for this promotion in anything it has released, so the live ballot's own rules are what an entrant must satisfy. No vote-buying service, whatever it promises, can ensure a win in any community ballot, and an entrant weighing purchased support should read the ballot's terms first. For the mechanics of building votes legitimately, our votes guide covers the tactics that work within a photo ballot's structure, and our award-votes page explains the purchasing side for those who consider it.