The Readers' Choice Award: How Voting Works & How to Win

A student book vote in a field of business ballots

Most public-vote programs in Colorado ask adults to pick a favorite business. Top of the Town, Best of Denver, Best of the Springs and their neighbors hand readers a ballot of restaurants, shops and services. The Readers' Choice Award runs in the opposite direction. It is the student-facing vote inside the Colorado Blue Spruce Young Adult Book Award, administered by Partners in Literacy, and the people it addresses are young readers and the teachers and librarians who work with them.

The nominated titles are recently published young adult books, and Colorado students nominated them, which the organizer sums up in the phrase it uses on the ballot page: kids listen to kids. Voting, in the organizer's words, empowers young readers, and the whole design assumes a school or library setting rather than a shopping one.

The ballot lives on the domain the literacy group operates itself at coloradobluespruceaward.partnersinliteracy.org, not on a third-party contest platform, so the page a supporter reaches is the same page Partners in Literacy maintains for educators. That combination, a statewide youth book award on an organizer-run domain, is what separates this program from every Colorado sibling listed on this site. The table below pulls the fixed facts together.

The dated record for this award

Partners in Literacy reimagined the Colorado Blue Spruce Young Adult Book Award in 2021, and the Readers' Choice Award is the public vote that sits inside the reworked program. The organizer's pages confirm editions in 2025 and 2026, both framed around an academic year rather than a calendar year, and the current masthead reads Academic Year 2026-2027.

The dated window on the ballot is specific: for the 2025-2026 CBSA, voting is open February 9 through April 10. That places the vote in the spring of the school year, when a teacher can still build a class vote into the term, and it gives supporters a defined stretch for the daily returns the rules allow.

Missing from the ballot page is a printed roster of the nominated titles, and the dates for the cycle after the current one have not been posted either, so confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The organizer also publishes no category breakdown for this award, which is unsurprising since the vote is for books rather than for businesses sorted into separate categories.

No announcement of a mid-cycle change has appeared, and the pattern across the confirmed years is a single spring window stated plainly on the ballot page itself. A supporter planning around this award should treat the printed window as the plan and the next cycle's dates as an open question until the organizer posts them.

How a supporter votes today

The mechanic is built to be simple. A supporter opens the Readers' Choice Award page on the Colorado Blue Spruce site, reads the nominated titles, and picks a favorite to vote for. The organizer's rule, as printed on the page, is that "You may vote once per day, per person, from any device." That sentence does three things at once: it sets the frequency, it ties the vote to a person rather than an account, and it explicitly welcomes phones, tablets and library computers alike.

The daily return is therefore the unit of participation. A student who wants a favorite book to win comes back each day of the window and votes again, and the organizer's window for the 2025-2026 award gave that habit a long runway from February 9 to April 10.

The organizer also builds a second route for groups. The ballot page addresses teachers directly: "If you are a teacher and you want your whole class to vote, we hope you will show your students the team-made book talks and have them vote either by a show of hands or allowing each one to hand in one of the ballots below." The team-made book talks are the organizer's own preparation material, produced so that a class can meet the nominated titles without each student reading every book first.

Librarians and other adults working with young patrons are invited to do the same, since the page opens with a call to invite youth patrons and students to vote. In every version of the mechanic, the vote is free and no purchase or registration step is described anywhere on the ballot page.

How this ballot sits beside its Colorado neighbors

Across Colorado, the public-vote programs on this site are dominated by publisher-run best-of lists, and each has its own host and its own rhythm. Top of the Town belongs to 5280, Best of Denver to Westword, Best of NOCO to NOCO Style, Best of the Springs to the Gazette, Best of Summit County to its own regional publisher, and Best of the Boat to the Steamboat market. Every one of them asks readers to choose businesses.

The Readers' Choice Award answers a different question entirely. Its organizer is a literacy organization rather than a media company, its ballot lists books rather than vendors, and its intended voters are students rather than consumers. A business cannot be nominated here, and a restaurant owner has no reason to campaign on this ballot; a young adult title and the classroom behind it do.

The timing differs too. Publisher best-of contests typically anchor to a summer or fall cycle aimed at adult readers, while this award anchors to the academic year, with its 2025-2026 vote running February 9 through April 10 so that schools are in session while the window is open.

For the practical reader the distinction matters most when searching. Someone typing "readers choice" into a search engine in Colorado could land on any of these programs, and the answers do not transfer: the rules, the window and the platform of a publisher best-of list say nothing about this student book vote, and vice versa.

Building real support inside this award's rules

Support for a title on this ballot grows the way the organizer designed it to grow: through daily returns and through classrooms. Because the printed rule permits one vote per person per day from any device, a supporter's most effective honest action is a steady habit, one vote each day from February 9 to April 10 in the current cycle, rather than a single push. A teacher multiplies that honestly by showing the team-made book talks and letting a whole class vote by show of hands or by submitted ballots, which turns thirty students into thirty votes in one sitting. Sharing the ballot with a school librarian reaches the youth patrons the page explicitly invites. Our votes guide walks through these organic tactics in detail. What the organizer's page does not describe is any paid or accelerated route to votes, so any outside help a supporter considers has to be weighed against the organizer's own terms and the general legal picture at is buying votes legal.