A Taste of AZ People's Choice Award: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the A Taste of AZ People's Choice Award is and who runs it

A Taste of AZ People's Choice Award is a community-decided honor presented in Tempe, Arizona, by Downtown Tempe, whose full printed name is the Downtown Tempe Authority. The organization is based at 1 W. Rio Salado Parkway and produces the Tempe Festival of the Arts, the fall street festival that fills Mill Avenue and the surrounding blocks with fine art, live music, family activities and local food. The People's Choice award rides along with that festival rather than running as a separate program with its own season.

The vote runs on downtowntempe.com itself. The voting URL is the Downtown Tempe release page announcing the festival's return, which means supporters deal with one publisher for both the festival news and the ballot. No outside balloting vendor stands between the voter and the organizer, so any instructions, dates or rules a supporter needs will appear on Downtown Tempe's own pages.

Within this site's coverage the award belongs to the best-of family: a community honor where local businesses, makers and vendors compete for a title decided by the public rather than by a jury. The table collects the fixed details.

The dated record for the Tempe people's choice vote

The award's confirmed years are 2025 and 2026. The 2025 cycle is anchored to a specific, dated event, because Downtown Tempe's own release announces that the 57th annual Fall Tempe Festival of the Arts returned to Downtown Tempe Dec. 5-7, 2025, transforming Mill Avenue and surrounding streets into a festival ground. That three-day window is the firmest date attached to the program, and the award's page lives on the release announcing it.

What the organizer has not published next to the award is the voting window itself: no opening day, no closing day and no nomination round dates appear alongside the People's Choice listing, so the exact dates a supporter needs to confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The same page carries no category roster and no statement of whether one supporter may vote repeatedly, and Downtown Tempe has not posted a separate rules document for the award.

Because the festival coverage calls the fall event the 57th annual edition, the tradition behind the award is long-standing even though the award's own confirmed years on this page begin with 2025. The next expected cycle falls in 2027, and the organizer's events calendar and release page are where a new window would be announced first.

How a supporter votes in A Taste of AZ today

Voting here is direct: the ballot sits on Downtown Tempe's own pages, and a supporter opens the release page that carries the award, reads it as it stands for the current cycle, and casts a vote for the Tempe business or maker they want to see win the People's Choice title. No outside vendor sits in front of the vote, so there is no separate sign-in screen belonging to another company.

Several practical points are simply not printed on the page. The organizer does not state whether a supporter may vote once or return daily, whether an email address is required, or which categories the People's Choice vote covers, and no eligibility text for entrants is posted either. Those gaps are not unusual for a festival-attached award, but they mean a supporter's only reliable instruction is the ballot itself.

Timing matters more here than on a year-round best-of ballot. The 2025 festival ran Dec. 5-7, and a vote attached to a three-day street festival may well be concentrated around that weekend rather than spread across a season. A supporter who wants their vote to count should open the page in the weeks before the fall festival, read whatever window Downtown Tempe has posted for that year, and vote inside it rather than assuming the ballot stays open year-round.

How this ballot sits beside its Arizona neighbours

Arizona carries a busy best-of calendar, and this award is unusual within it. Most of the state's community-vote programs are standalone reader polls run by a publication over weeks or months, while A Taste of AZ is attached to a single downtown festival weekend and runs on the organizer's own site rather than a dedicated balloting platform. Its market is one city, Tempe, and its organizer is a downtown authority rather than a media company.

Its closest comparisons on this site are media-run reader polls: Best of Havasu in Lake Havasu, Best of Sedona Kudos, Best of the 'Burg from the Wickenburg Sun, Best of the Desert AZ Community's Choice Awards, Best of Verde Valley and CommunityVotes Buckeye. Every one of them has a different publisher behind it, and support given in one counts for nothing in another.

For a Tempe business, that distinction shapes strategy. A festival-attached vote rewards being present on Mill Avenue during the December weekend, when thousands of visitors walk past the entrants in person, in a way a months-long poll does not. An entrant weighing where to spend effort should treat this award and the state's reader polls as separate campaigns with different calendars, different audiences and different organizers to consult.

Strengthening support for a Tempe festival award

Because this vote is tied to the Tempe Festival of the Arts, the strongest support a Tempe entrant can build starts with the crowd the festival itself delivers. The 2025 edition brought fine art, live music and family activities to Mill Avenue Dec. 5-7, and every visitor who walks those blocks is a potential voter. Signage at a booth or storefront, a mention from staff, and a simple ask at the point of sale all convert foot traffic into ballots faster than any online push.

Downtown Tempe's position on outside help is not published: the organizer has posted no rules text covering software, bulk voting or eligibility for this award, so entrants should ask directly before commissioning any outside support. Absent a published rule, the safe course is the one that works for any community ballot, which is support built from real people who actually visited.

If an entrant wants a wider playbook, our guide to getting more votes online covers outreach that works across public-vote contests, and the award-votes page explains the options for award-style ballots generally. Neither replaces the basic move here: be findable on the festival map, be easy to vote for, and give the Downtown Tempe audience a reason to pick your name.