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

A Lake Havasu City ballot that mixes nominating and voting in one form

Among the Arizona best-of ballots on the Second Street platform, the 2025 MVDN Best of stands out for its format. Where many readers' choice programmes split the year into a nomination round and a separate voting round, River City Newspapers typed this promotion as a Ballot with a NominationAndVotingBallot format, which means supporters nominate and vote through the same ballot flow. For a local business trying to rally supporters, that changes the timing conversation: there is no separate nomination phase to plan around before votes count.

The programme belongs to River City Newspapers, the organization behind the havasunews.secondstreetapp.com ballot host, which serves the Lake Havasu City, Arizona market and the surrounding Lower Colorado River area. The ballot sits in the best-of vertical, meaning it asks readers to name their favorites across local categories. It is a public vote, so participation is open to the audience the publisher reaches rather than to a closed membership.

The essentials

That combination of a single-flow ballot, a specific Arizona newspaper market and a spring window is what distinguishes this programme from its neighbours, several of which are covered on this site in their own pages.

The dated editions behind the 2025 MVDN Best of

Confirmed editions of this programme ran in 2024 and 2025. Both ran on the same Second Street host, and the 2024 cycle left behind separate pages for its winners and its ballot, which is how the annual pattern is established. The 2025 edition opened on May 15, 2025 and closed on June 18, 2025, a live window of a little over a month in late spring.

The programme also has a documented continuation. A promotion named 2026 MVDN Best of Readers Choice ran under the same River City Newspapers organization from May 1 through June 25, 2026, and it has closed as well. Its address points at the publisher's Mohave-area news site, and its slightly expanded name suggests the MVDN Best of brand carried forward rather than restarting. Taken together, the 2024, 2025 and 2026 promotions sketch a spring-to-early-summer habit: each edition has opened in May.

What River City Newspapers has not printed anywhere outside the ballot pages is the category lineup for each edition, along with eligibility terms and any cap on supporter participation; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The 2024 cycle also shows the publisher publishes a winners page after a cycle closes, so results are the other dated artifact to watch for once a window ends.

How a supporter votes on the MVDN Best of ballot

Voting happens on a Second Street ballot page open to the public. During a live window, a supporter opens the edition's own address, in 2025 that was the page for the 2025 MVDN Best of, and works through the ballot form. Because the promotion is typed as a NominationAndVotingBallot, the form combines nominating and voting: where a category calls for it, the supporter enters the Lake Havasu City business or organization they want recognized, and the submission doubles as the vote.

Nothing about the flow requires a supporter to go anywhere else. The categories, the write-in behavior and any registration step are all controlled by the live form, which is why the page itself, not a summary, settles questions like whether an account is needed. River City Newspapers has not published a rules document for this programme outside the ballot, so the form's prompts are the operative instructions while voting is open.

After submission, any repeat participation depends on what that edition's ballot permits. The 2025 window ran from May 15 through June 18, 2025, so during that period supporters could return to the form as allowed. Once a cycle closes, the page switches to its closed status, and the publisher's practice from 2024 shows a winners page following. A supporter whose favorite is a local business should expect the business itself to publicize the exact address during the live window, since the URL changes with each edition year.

How MVDN Best of sits among its Arizona neighbours

The clearest contrast is with Best of Havasu, the sibling ballot that shares both the publisher and the Second Street host. Best of Havasu is the Lake Havasu City readers' choice flagship, with its 2026 edition running June 15 through August 1, while the MVDN Best of runs earlier in the spring and carries the MVDN brand tied to the publisher's Mohave-area news operation. A Lake Havasu City business can therefore appear on two ballots from the same organizer in the same year, and support built for either one does not carry over automatically.

Beyond that host, the wider Arizona best-of field includes Best of Sedona Kudos, Best of the 'Burg (Wickenburg Sun), Best of the Desert AZ Community's Choice Awards, Best of Verde Valley and CommunityVotes Buckeye. Those programmes answer to different publishers and different markets, from Sedona to Wickenburg to Buckeye, so a rule or category shape observed on any of them says nothing about the MVDN Best of.

What keeps the MVDN Best of distinct within the shared host is the combined nomination-and-voting format and the spring window. Each edition also lives at its own dated address, which is why a supporter following a 2027 cycle should expect a fresh ballot page rather than a reused link, and why the organizer's own promotion list on the Second Street host is the reliable way to spot when the next edition goes live.

Timing support to the MVDN Best of window

The single most important constraint in this programme is the window itself. The 2025 edition gave supporters a live stretch from May 15 to June 18, and every edition since 2024 has opened in May, so a Lake Havasu City business that waits until June to organize its base is working against the clock. Publicize the exact ballot address early, because it changes with each edition and an old link lands on a closed page. Since nominating and voting happen in the same form, there is no nomination phase to seed in advance; the push and the votes land together.

Because the organizer publishes no rules document outside the ballot, a business should read the live form's prompts before encouraging repeat visits, and keep any outside-help question grounded in what those terms actually say. General tactics that translate well to this format, such as coordinating outreach through channels the business already controls and making the ask early in the window, are collected in our votes guide, and the award ballots overview explains how purchased support is generally framed for ballots of this type without promising any result.