Delaware Gazette Readers' Choice: How Voting Works & How to Win

Why 'Delaware Gazette' Doesn't Mean the State of Delaware

Type "Delaware Gazette Readers' Choice" into a search bar and the instinct is to assume it's a statewide award for the actual state of Delaware. It isn't. The Delaware Gazette is a community newspaper based in Delaware, Ohio, the seat of Delaware County, a fast-growing slice of the Columbus metro nowhere near the Atlantic coast.

That naming overlap trips up more than casual readers. A business owner searching for how to get on the ballot, or a supporter trying to find the right link to share, can land on the wrong page entirely by assuming "Delaware" means the East Coast state. This guide sits inside that state's contest hub for search purposes, but everything below describes an Ohio paper's own reader poll.

Real Delaware-the-state programs do exist on this site, and they're worth the click if that's actually what a reader wants: the 302Sports.com Athlete of the Week, the Delmarva Now Athlete of the Week for southern Delaware sports, the Cape Gazette Battle of the Bartenders from the Delaware beach towns, and CommunityVotes Newark covering Newark, Delaware specifically. None of those four programs share an organizer, a state, or a ballot with the Ohio paper described here.

What the Confirmed Ballot Record Actually Shows

Seventeen. That's the edition number the Delaware Gazette itself attached to its 2025 ballot, published at delgazette.com on May 21 of that year. Count backward from a first "1st Annual" edition and the math lands the program's roots around 2009, though the paper's own site is the place to confirm an exact founding year rather than this arithmetic.

The program didn't stop there. Our source confirms the Gazette ran the Readers' Choice ballot again in 2026, extending a run that, by 2025, had already cleared seventeen consecutive years. That's a longer track record than plenty of pop-up online polls carry.

What isn't in the confirmed record

No category list. No published vote cap. No public archive of past winners or vote totals. Those gaps matter, because a business owner planning a campaign needs the actual ballot structure before asking customers to vote, and guessing at a category that doesn't exist wastes everyone's time. The honest answer: check delgazette.com directly for the live ballot's categories and rules each year, since none of that is published anywhere this guide could verify.

How the Ballot Works, and What delgazette.com Hasn't Published

The confirmed 2025 ballot lived at a dated URL, delgazette.com/2025/05/21/17th-annual-readers-choice-2025-ballot/, which tells us something useful on its own: this paper posts its ballot as a dated article, not a permanent standalone voting page. A shared link from last year's cycle will point to last year's now-closed ballot. Anyone sharing a link needs the current year's post, not a bookmarked one from a prior spring.

Beyond that URL pattern, the specifics thin out fast. Whether the ballot groups nominees by category page, the way Elite Insights structures Alaska's Best of Juneau, or runs as one long combined form is simply not something the Gazette has spelled out in public. Neither is a per-day vote limit, a submission cap, or whether the paper requires an email address to cast a ballot.

None of that is unusual for a mid-size county paper's own reader poll. It just means a campaign built on assumptions borrowed from a bigger syndicated platform, a Sports Illustrated fan vote or a USA Today Network readers' choice, could easily be wrong here. For general vote-campaign mechanics that apply once the actual ballot format is confirmed, award-style vote campaigns covers pacing and reminder cadence that transfers across most readers-choice formats.

Delaware County's Growth Shapes Who Actually Votes

Delaware, Ohio sits at the northern edge of the Columbus metro, and the county named after it has spent recent decades absorbing new subdivisions as Columbus development pushes north along US-23. That growth changes the readership math for a paper like the Gazette: newer residents on the county's suburban fringe may never have picked up a print edition, while longtime Delaware, Ostrander, and Radnor families likely still treat it as the paper of record.

Where exactly the Gazette's core readership sits within the county isn't spelled out in what's confirmed here, but the paper's home base in Delaware itself puts it closer to the county's central and western villages, Ostrander, Radnor, and Ashley, than to the eastern edge toward Sunbury and Galena. A business weighing whether its customers overlap with Gazette readers should think in those terms: is the store on the central-western side of the county, or out toward Columbus's outer suburbs where a county weekly's reach usually thins?

None of that swaps in for asking directly. A quick call to the Gazette's own office settles the readership-overlap question faster than any guide can. What a business can control is where it points its own customers once nominated: a specific dated ballot link shared over Facebook or a text thread reaches real Delaware County shoppers, not a generic "go vote for us on the Gazette" post with no URL attached.

Reading a Delaware Gazette 'Win' Claim the Right Way

"Voted Delaware's Best" sounds like the state of Delaware. Said by a business quoting the Gazette's Readers' Choice results, it almost certainly means the Ohio paper's own poll, and that ambiguity is exactly the kind of claim worth tightening before it goes on a storefront window or a social post.

The precise version travels better anyway. "17th Annual Readers' Choice, Delaware Gazette, 2025" cites a specific edition a reader could, in theory, trace back to the actual delgazette.com posting. A bare "Delaware's Best" with no year, no paper name, and no edition number invites exactly the state-versus-city confusion this guide opened with, and it risks overstating a genuinely local Ohio-county honor as something bigger.

What a business can legitimately do is point its real customers, past and present, at the exact current-year ballot link and ask plainly for a vote. What no one can do responsibly is fabricate a result the Gazette hasn't published, or imply a statewide Delaware honor this program was never designed to be. For the general legal and practical ground rules around any vote-driving campaign, see is buying votes legal, and for how a broader vote-promotion push typically works, how online contest votes work covers the mechanics that apply once the Gazette's own ballot rules are confirmed for the current cycle.