2026 Pets We Love Fan Favorites: How Voting Works & How to Win

A Sarasota pet owner's problem with this ballot

If you run a grooming salon, a rescue or a veterinary practice in Sarasota, a strong showing in the Pets We Love Fan Favorites ballot is cheap advertising, and the first problem is knowing what you are actually entering. SRQ Magazine runs the program. The publication sits in Sarasota, Florida, and has built its competitions portfolio on Second Street, which also carries its Best of SRQ Local Readers Competition and its seasonal sweepstakes. The pet ballot is one piece of that portfolio, not a standalone site run by an unknown operator.

The shape of the 2026 round is the part worth understanding before you commit effort to it. Nomination opened on February 6, 2026, when the magazine invited readers to nominate their pets, and public voting then ran from May 1 through May 31, 2026 on a closed basis after that date. That gives a nominating business a long runway between entry and vote, which changes how you plan outreach: the audience you build in spring is the audience that votes in the May window.

The facts below are the confirmed frame for the 2026 edition.

Everything a supporter needs beyond this frame lives on the Second Street ballot itself, which is the one address SRQ Magazine publishes for the vote.

The dated history for Pets We Love Fan Favorites

Confirmed editions of this program ran in 2021, 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026. Each of those years has its own Second Street ballot at an address carrying that year, which is how the series can be traced cycle by cycle. The 2022 slot is the one recent year without a confirmed edition, so a reader who assumes an unbroken annual streak since 2021 is going one year further than the confirmed years support.

The organizer's own description backs the annual label. In its May 2023 issue, SRQ Magazine introduced the winners as coming from its "5th annual contest", which places the series' informal start well before the confirmed platform years and confirms the publisher thinks of it as a yearly fixture rather than a one-off promotion.

For 2026, the dated shape is specific. Nominations opened on February 6, 2026, through the magazine's competitions page, and public voting ran from May 1 to May 31, 2026 on the Second Street ballot, closing at the end of that month. The 2026 round is now closed; the expected next edition is the 2027 cycle, whose nomination and voting dates SRQ Magazine has not yet published.

What the organizer has not put in print anywhere alongside the ballot is the category roster and the per-supporter voting rules; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. That gap matters for planning, because a business deciding whether to nominate wants to know which pet groups exist and how vote counting treats repeat visits, and neither answer is available ahead of the ballot opening.

How a supporter votes on the Second Street ballot

The mechanics are simple, which is why the ballot moves volume. A supporter opens the program's address on Second Street, srqmagazine.secondstreetapp.com, where the 2026 ballot sat at https://srqmagazine.secondstreetapp.com/2026-Pets-We-Love-Fan-Favorites for its May run. The ballot page presents the pet groups open that cycle, the nominee entries within them, and a vote action beside each. The supporter picks a pet, submits, and the page confirms the choice.

Second Street ballots commonly ask a supporter to identify or register before a vote registers, and behaviour of that kind is set per ballot by the publisher. Whether the Pets We Love ballot requires sign-in, an email step or nothing at all is not stated in any page published away from the vote, so the supporter sees the requirement, if there is one, on the ballot itself and completes it there.

The same caution applies to frequency. Some Second Street ballots allow one vote per entry per day and others cap the whole session; SRQ Magazine has printed no frequency rule for this program on its published pages, so a supporter planning repeat visits should read whatever the live ballot displays at the vote button.

Timing is the one constraint that is firmly fixed. The vote only counts inside the published window, which in 2026 meant May 1 through May 31. Votes attempted after the ballot closes do not register, and once the round ends the address simply shows the finished result page until the next edition replaces it with its own year in the URL.

How this ballot sits among Florida's pet and readers polls

Pets We Love Fan Favorites is one of several Florida ballots in this space, and it differs from its neighbours on every axis that matters to a supporter. The closest matches in subject are the Animal Welfare League of Charlotte County Best in Show Photo Contest and the Dachshund Rescue South Florida Calendar Contest, both charity-run pet programs, but each answers to its own rescue organization and runs its own rules. None of the three shares an organizer or a platform arrangement with the others.

The wider Florida set on this site is readers-choice rather than pet-focused: the Best of Florida Awards, the Best of Miami Readers' Poll, the Best of Orlando and the Best of Tallahassee ballot each cover businesses and services in their own markets. A Sarasota pet business belongs in the SRQ ballot, not in those.

What makes the Pets We Love ballot distinct is the combination of a metro publisher, a dedicated spring window with an early nomination round, and a subject, local pets, that pulls emotional engagement well beyond the readers-choice format. SRQ Magazine also cross-promotes the program beside its Best of SRQ competition, so the pet ballot rides the publisher's whole seasonal calendar.

Strengthening support for a nominee in this ballot

Because nominations opened February 6, 2026 and voting ran May 1 through May 31, the practical playbook for a Sarasota nominee is front-loaded: secure the nomination early, then spend the gap building the list of people who will actually vote. Share the direct Second Street address rather than a search link, name the pet and the exact group in every ask, and time reminders to the window opening and its final stretch.

On outside help, the organizer has published no statement for this program about purchased or automated votes, and no rule text sits on the ballot page away from the vote itself, so what the live rules say is what governs. What is true generally about media polls is that organizers treat suspicious voting patterns seriously and can remove votes, so outreach that brings real supporters is the durable play. Our guide to getting more votes online covers those methods in detail, and readers weighing paid options can see how providers compare on our award votes page. No vote service, whatever it promises, can guarantee a win in a poll like this one.