2026 Brevard Community's Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Brevard Community's Choice Awards is and who runs it

A Brevard County business that hears "you were nominated" in late spring usually has one question first: what is this ballot, and who is behind it? The answer is FLORIDA TODAY, the newspaper that serves Brevard County, Florida. Its Community's Choice Awards is a readers'-choice program in the best-of vertical, meaning the public nominates and then votes on local businesses across a range of everyday categories.

Second Street is the balloting platform underneath, carrying FLORIDA TODAY's contest portfolio at floridatoday.gannettcontests.com. The publisher's organization listing identifies the 2026 edition as a Ballot/VotingBallot promotion, which is the format that combines a nomination phase with a public voting phase. That matters for a nominated business because it means two separate windows: first supporters put companies forward, then the top companies in each category move on to the voting round.

The program sits inside a wider contest calendar at the same address. FLORIDA TODAY also runs sweepstakes and other ballots there, including a Volunteer Recognition Awards ballot, so a business owner landing on the contest hub should confirm they are on the Community's Choice ballot and not an unrelated promotion.

The dated record: editions, windows and what is not published

Four editions are confirmed for this program: 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026. Each of those cycles has its own address on floridatoday.gannettcontests.com, and the 2024, 2025 and 2026 cycles each carry a dedicated nomination address and a dedicated winners address alongside the main ballot page. That structure is the clearest sign the program is a recurring fixture in the publisher's calendar rather than a one-off.

The 2026 cycle is the most precisely dated. Its voting round opened on May 11, 2026 and closed on May 26, 2026, and the ballot is now in a closed state. A nomination round preceded it, following the pattern the publisher describes: after nominations, the top companies in each category move on to the voting round. The next expected cycle is 2027, and FLORIDA TODAY sets its dates when that ballot goes live.

What the publisher has not printed ahead of the ballot is the category roster. FLORIDA TODAY has not published the list of ballot categories for the 2026 edition; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Any per-supporter limit on the voting round, and any eligibility rule for nominees, falls in that same unpublished group. A business that wants to plan its outreach around specific categories therefore has to wait for the ballot page itself to reveal them when the round opens, rather than relying on anything published in advance.

How a supporter votes in the Brevard Community's Choice Awards

For a customer who wants to back a favorite Brevard business, the mechanic is straightforward. The supporter opens the ballot at floridatoday.gannettcontests.com while a round is active, scrolls the category list printed on that page, finds the nominated company inside a category, selects it, and submits. The whole action happens on the ballot page itself, with no separate form to hunt for.

The cadence the publisher states applies to the nomination phase: a supporter can nominate a company once a day per category when the nomination round is active. That daily rhythm is why businesses that mobilize early in the nomination window tend to surface in the voting round, since the top companies in each category are the ones that move forward. Whether the voting round carries the same once-a-day-per-category rule is not stated in this guide's source material, so supporters should check whatever conditions the ballot displays when it opens.

Timing is the other half of the mechanic. The 2026 voting round ran from May 11 through May 26, 2026, a window of about two weeks, and the ballot now shows its closed state. A supporter arriving between cycles cannot log a vote and should wait for FLORIDA TODAY to open the next edition, expected in 2027. Once a cycle finishes, results move to the cycle's dedicated winners page, so the ballot address itself returns to a dormant state until the publisher relaunches it.

How this ballot sits beside its Florida neighbours

Brevard County is not the only Florida market with a public readers'-choice ballot, and the differences between them matter to a business deciding where to focus outreach. The Brevard Community's Choice Awards answers to a single publisher, FLORIDA TODAY, and runs on Second Street under the floridatoday.gannettcontests.com address. Its nomination-then-voting structure means a business has two chances each cycle to rally support, and the 2026 voting window fell in May.

Elsewhere in the state the shape changes. The Best of Florida Awards covers the state broadly, while the Best of Miami Readers' Poll and the Best of Orlando ballot serve single metros. The Best of Tallahassee ballot and Best of the Bay cover their own markets, and CommunityVotes Boynton Beach runs under a different program family altogether. Each answers to its own publisher, its own platform and its own calendar, so a rule or a date from one does not transfer to another.

What makes the Brevard ballot distinct within this set is its county-wide reach under a single daily newspaper's masthead, plus its two-phase structure with dedicated nomination and winners pages for each cycle. A Brevard business nominated here is competing for the attention of local readers of one publication, not a statewide or multi-city audience, which makes direct customer outreach unusually effective.

Strengthening support during a Brevard Community's Choice cycle

A nominated Brevard business has one lever that costs nothing and works: telling customers the ballot is open and exactly where to click. Because support happens directly on the FLORIDA TODAY ballot page, any reader of the paper is a potential supporter. Put the ballot address in an email, a counter sign and a social post, and name the specific categories the business appears in, since supporters otherwise have to scroll the full roster to find it.

Respect the two-phase rhythm. During the nomination round the publisher's stated cadence is one nomination per company per category per day, so a daily reminder to regulars is aligned with the rules rather than against them. Once the voting round opens, the same outreach continues against the fixed window, which in 2026 ran from May 11 to May 26. Reminders near the close of a window are the most effective because supporters who meant to vote often have not yet done so.

Stay inside the publisher's rules. FLORIDA TODAY governs what counts on its ballot, and outreach that looks padded with irregular activity risks the whole entry. Organic asks to real customers, timed across the window, are the durable play. For tactics that apply across public ballots, see our guide on getting more votes online.