Durham Holiday Lights Contest: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Durham Holiday Lights Contest is and who runs it

The Durham Holiday Lights Contest is a People's Choice vote run by the Town of Durham in Connecticut. It is tied to the town's Holiday Lights Tour, and the vote is cast through a town form rather than through an outside contest platform. The 2025 tour page is the point where readers are sent to that form.

The contest asks residents and visitors to choose the holiday display they most want to honor. Because it is a People's Choice award, the outcome reflects public preference among people who tour the lights, not a panel's assessment of the displays.

The 2025 close and the editions on record

The 2025 form says voting is open through Friday, 12/19, and the 2025 tour page carries the People's Choice form. Editions appear for 2025 and 2026, and the 2026 edition continues the annual holiday lights vote. The form does not print an opening day in the text that describes it, so the start of the 2025 vote is not known from the form alone.

No later close is published for the next holiday season, so the form and the tour page remain the places to check. The opening day for the next vote is not printed; confirm on the live ballot each cycle before planning a visit.

How a visitor casts a People's Choice vote

A visitor tours the Durham lights, opens the People's Choice form and selects the display they want to honor. The rules read as one vote per person, and they ask voters to refrain from repeat votes. The form is the only place the vote is accepted, which is why the close date matters for every visitor.

Because the rules count votes per person rather than per device, a visitor should use the form once and then leave the rest to other people. A repeat submission from the same person is outside the rule, so the sound method is a wider set of visitors. Read the form's title before voting as well, so that you are casting the People's Choice ballot for the Holiday Lights Tour and not some other town form.

How Durham sits beside the Connecticut best-of and community ballots

Connecticut has several best-of and community ballots in the same catalogue, including Best of Connecticut, Best of Gold Coast, Best of Hartford, Best of New Haven, Best of West Hartford and CommunityVotes Bridgeport. Most of those are publisher-run readers' ballots about businesses and services.

The Durham contest is different in subject. It is a town-run People's Choice vote about holiday displays, with its own form and its own one-vote-per-person rule, so a reader should not carry a close date or a vote rule from any of the sibling ballots onto this one.

Building public support for a Durham display before the close

A display owner in Durham who wants a stronger People's Choice result should make the tour easy to find and ask visitors to vote once each on the form before the close on Friday, 12/19. Because the rule allows one vote per person, the work is to reach many separate visitors rather than to push repeat votes from one household. Any reminder should go out before the Friday, 12/19 close, since the rules give no later date to fall back on.

Outreach that stays inside the rules is the only kind worth planning. The guide on getting more votes online sets out that approach. A reader who wants the legal background on paid help can read whether buying votes is legal, and the buy votes online page describes paid support without promising a win.