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

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

The 2026 Treasure Coast Community's Choice Awards is a best-of balloting program for the Treasure Coast region of Florida. TCPalm.com runs it, and the Second Street balloting platform hosts the vote. The 2026 ballot sits at tcpalm.gannettcontests.com/2026-Treasure-Coast-Communitys-Choice-Awards, and the platform classifies the promotion as a Ballot/VotingBallot rather than a sweepstakes.

That classification matters when comparing programs on the same hub. TCPalm.com's contest domain also carries simple sweepstakes, such as the Get Kalahari'd Away Fall 2026 email promotions that ran from August 15 to November 1, 2026. Those are random-draw promotions. The Community's Choice Awards is a different animal: the audience, not a drawing, decides the outcome. Its vertical is best-of, the same family as the sibling programs linked at the foot of this page.

The market is the Treasure Coast, the name both the program and its publisher use, and the state is Florida. No county and no individual city are printed for this program, so this page names the region and stops there. The fixed facts a reader can quote are collected below.

Edition history and the 2026 calendar

Four editions of this program have confirmed years: 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026. Evidence from outside the ballot platform reaches further back, because a Treasure Coast home builder's own awards page lists Community's Choice wins in 2021, 2022 and 2023, so the program's footprint predates the earliest year the ballot platform shows. The 2027 edition is the next expected run.

The 2026 cycle ran in two stages. Nominations opened March 10, 2026 and closed March 31, 2026. After nominations, the top companies in each category moved on to the voting round, which the organizer's own page dates May 15 through May 29, 2026. The platform listing for the promotion shows the ballot running through May 30, 2026, and marks the promotion closed.

The single dated fact worth remembering is that the 2026 voting round occupied the second half of May. Whether the 2027 cycle keeps the same spring slot has not been printed anywhere yet. Nomination and voting dates for a new edition appear on the contest hub when the organizer opens it, and prior-year ballots at the same domain, including the 2025 and 2024 editions and their nomination and winners pages, remain the best preview of how a coming cycle will be structured.

How a supporter votes on the Treasure Coast ballot

The Second Street ballot at the URL above is where the vote takes place. The cycle begins with nominations: during the March window, supporters submit the Treasure Coast business they want recognized. Once nominations close, the leading nominees in each category advance, and the public votes for favorites during the May window. The organizer's own description is plain about the sequence: after nominations, the top companies in each category move on to the voting round.

What the ballot does not print matters just as much. TCPalm.com has not published the ballot's category list or any limit on repeat voting; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Eligibility rules for nominees are likewise absent from the material available for this program. A supporter needing those details before voting will find them in the rules block printed on the live ballot, because that is the only place the organizer states them.

No login requirement, no daily-return schedule and no vote ceiling are stated anywhere for this program, so the live form's own instructions are the operative rule on voting day. That is normal for publisher-run ballots on Second Street: the mechanics a supporter sees on the page, nomination form first and voting form second, are the whole process, and nothing about the program requires an account beyond whatever the ballot itself asks for.

Where this ballot sits among Florida's readers' choice programs

Florida holds many public-vote ballots, and this one occupies a distinct slot. The Best of Florida Awards covers the entire state. The Best of Miami Readers' Poll anchors to a single city. The same is true of Best of Orlando and of Best of Tallahassee, each of which answers to a separate organizer in its own market. The Best of the Bay serves the Tampa Bay region, and CommunityVotes Boynton Beach runs a nominate-then-vote structure for the Boynton Beach community.

The Treasure Coast ballot differs from all of them on three points. First, its organizer is a news publisher, TCPalm.com, whose contest hub hosts the ballot alongside sweepstakes under the same roof. Second, its market is a multi-county coastal region rather than one city or the whole state. Third, its cycle is split into a March nomination round and a May voting round, so a business must survive the nomination stage before any vote count begins.

For a nominee, those differences are practical. A customer base spread across the Treasure Coast can carry a campaign here in a way it could not in a single-city poll, and the two-stage calendar means support has to be organized twice, once in March and again in May. None of the sibling programs shares this exact shape.

Strengthening support for a Treasure Coast nominee

This ballot's structure rewards early organization. Because nominations in March decide who appears on the May ballot, a business that wants a shot must first mobilize customers to nominate it; only after advancing does the vote count begin. Reminders timed to the published windows, signage at the counter and a link to the ballot on the business's own site are the moves that fit this cycle.

TCPalm.com's rules on outside voting help are not printed with the ballot material, so a nominee planning a larger push should read the live rules before relying on any third party. Anyone wanting to understand paid vote services in award ballots at a general level can turn to the award votes page, and organic tactics that suit a two-stage ballot are covered in the votes guide. The legality question is treated separately at the legality reference. Whatever route a supporter takes, the organizer's own contest terms are the document that governs this specific ballot.