2027 Palm Beach County Community's Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Community's Choice Awards are and who runs them

The Palm Beach County Community's Choice Awards are a best-of recognition program for local businesses and organizations, decided by public vote rather than by a judging panel. The organizer is the Palm Beach Post, the Gannett-owned daily newspaper based in West Palm Beach, and the ballot lives on Second Street, the contest platform the newspaper runs under its palmbeachpost.gannettcontests.com domain. The program covers Palm Beach County, Florida, so the field of nominees is drawn from businesses across the county rather than one city alone.

Two features of the 2027 edition shape how a nominating business approaches it. First, the ballot type is a combined NominationAndVotingBallot, meaning the nomination stage and the voting stage share one window on the same platform rather than running as separate contests. Second, the category field is broad, described in published coverage of the program as spanning restaurants, salons and many other local trades, which means a business can appear in several fields at once and its supporters can spread ballots across them.

Program facts at a glance

For a nominating business the practical question this page answers is simple: where the ballot lives and what the organizer has actually put in writing about it. Everything above is drawn from the program's own platform listing and the newspaper's published pages for the awards.

The dated history for the 2027 edition

The 2027 Palm Beach County Community's Choice Awards have a confirmed nomination and voting window of October 12 through December 31, 2026. That single phase is listed as upcoming on the Second Street platform for the Palm Beach Post organization, and it is the only dated window for the 2027 program. Because the ballot type combines nomination and voting, supporters and nominees work inside one continuous run rather than two separated rounds.

The program is annual. Every cycle from 2023 through 2026 has completed, and the 2027 edition is dated as upcoming, with the newspaper having published dedicated pages for each cycle, including nomination pages and separate winners pages for the earlier editions. The 2024 cycle, for example, has a main ballot page, a nominations page and a winners page, and the same three-page pattern repeats for 2025 and 2026.

What the published pages do not settle is the fine print. The Palm Beach Post does not print nominee eligibility criteria or the terms governing who may cast a ballot alongside the dates; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Businesses that were nominated in an earlier edition should also verify whether prior-year nominations carry over, since nothing published for the 2027 cycle states that they do.

The practical takeaway from this history is the length of the runway. A window that stays open from mid-October to the end of December gives a business nearly three months of daily-vote opportunities per category, which is a very different outreach problem from a short sprint ballot.

How a supporter votes in the 2027 ballot today

Supporting a business here is a simple public action. The supporter loads the ballot at the Palm Beach Post's Gannett contests domain, picks a category, selects the business or organization worth recognizing, and submits. The program's stated rhythm is a vote once a day per category while the voting round is active, which is the cadence that separates engaged supporter bases from one-time visits.

That per-category structure matters for how support is organized. Published coverage describes the program as spanning restaurants, salons and a wide range of other local businesses across its categories, so a single nominee often appears in several fields, and a supporter willing to work through each one multiplies the ballots cast for that business without breaking any published rule. The daily reset means the same supporter can arrive again the following day and back the same business in the same category.

Second Street, the newspaper's contest platform, is built around newspaper readers' polls, so the interface follows the familiar nominate-then-vote flow: categories listed on the ballot page, nominees under each heading, and a submission per selection. There is no paid voting tier; backing a business costs nothing.

Timing is the last element. Ballots count only inside the October 12 through December 31, 2026 window, so a reminder campaign that lands in November still has a full month and a half of daily votes ahead of it, while anything planned for January arrives after the 2027 edition has closed.

How this ballot sits beside its Florida neighbours

Palm Beach County is not short of readers' choice ballots, and the Community's Choice Awards are distinct from each of its neighbours in who publishes them and what geography they cover. The Best of Florida Awards run statewide, while the Best of Miami Readers' Poll and the Best of Orlando anchor metro markets to the south and north. Every one of those programs answers to a different publisher on a separate calendar.

The closest structural neighbours on this page's own list are the Best of Tallahassee poll, the Best of the Bay program, and CommunityVotes Boynton Beach, which covers a municipality inside Palm Beach County itself. A Boynton Beach business could therefore sit in two county-area ballots at once, run by different organizers on different rules.

What sets the Community's Choice Awards apart within that crowd is its publisher and platform. It belongs to the Palm Beach Post rather than a national best-of brand, it runs on Second Street under the newspaper's Gannett contests domain, and its combined nomination-and-voting format folds two stages into one long window. Businesses deciding where to invest outreach should match the ballot their customers already read to the newspaper they already follow, because name recognition with the publisher carries the program's audience.

Strengthening support inside this ballot's rules

This program rewards persistence, not volume on a single day. The ballot allows one vote per supporter per category per day across a window that runs October 12 through December 31, 2026, so the strongest campaigns turn daily reminders into a habit: a line in receipts, a recurring social post, a mention at the counter. Because the category field is broad, tell supporters exactly which fields your business appears in, since a supporter who cannot find your category simply votes elsewhere.

The Palm Beach Post publishes no statement about outside help or purchased support for this program anywhere on its ballot pages. The rules that do govern the ballot are the daily per-category rhythm and the closing date, so any support effort should be measured against those. If you are comparing options, this overview of award-vote support explains the general landscape without promising outcomes, and the newspaper's own terms always take precedence over anything written here.