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

Not another statewide Florida "best of" poll

Florida runs a crowded field of "best of" and readers'-choice polls, and most of them belong to a single regional magazine or newspaper with no ties to anything outside its own market. Leesburg Community's Choice Awards is a different shape entirely: a local edition of the national Your Choice Awards platform, organized by a Gannett USA TODAY Network paper, with a result that still answers only to Leesburg.

The organizer's own page describes the program as recognizing more than 360 Leesburg businesses and organizations every year, a scale that fits a genuinely local franchise of a much larger national platform rather than a one-city vanity poll.

The dated record so far

2025 and 2026 are the two editions Leesburg Community's Choice Awards can currently point to. The 2026 cycle ran a full, now-closed sequence: nominations opened May 8 and ran through May 29, voting followed July 16 through July 30, and the paper announced winners September 20.

What the page does not yet show is a 2027 calendar. A business or supporter checking today has no confirmed date to plan a next campaign around; confirm on the live ballot each cycle once a new one is posted.

Two confirmed years is a shorter run than some Florida civic polls carry, but the "more than 360 businesses and organizations" line on the organizer's own page suggests a program already operating at real local scale in just its second confirmed cycle.

How a supporter votes today

Leesburg Community's Choice Awards moves through the same two-stage pattern every confirmed edition has followed. Nominations open first, and a business is entered under the name its own Leesburg customers already know. Once nominations close, the confirmed page narrows every category to five finalists, and only that shortlist carries into the voting round.

Once that voting round is live, a supporter can return once a day in every category, not just once for the whole ballot. Someone backing more than one Leesburg finalist can work back through each category daily for as long as the round stays open, rather than treating the page as a single yes-or-no vote.

With the 2026 round already closed and its winners already named, there is no live ballot to act on this week. The same nominate-then-vote sequence, narrowed each time to five finalists a category, is what returns whenever the page opens its next cycle.

How Leesburg's ballot sits beside Florida's other "best of" polls

Leesburg's ballot is one of several Florida programs carrying some version of a "best of" or "community's choice" name, and keeping them straight matters for a business deciding where to spend effort.

None of those six share judges or a combined results page with Leesburg's ballot, so a strong showing here does nothing for a business's standing on any of them. Chasing recognition across several of these Florida programs at once means running separate campaigns under separate rulebooks, not one coordinated push.

Building support around a five-finalist category shortlist

Because each category narrows to five finalists before voting even starts, a Leesburg business first needs enough nomination support to clear that shortlist at all. After that, the platform's once-a-day, per-category voting rule rewards return visits over a single burst of activity near a deadline.

The Leesburg page does not spell out its own position on outside campaign help, so is buying votes legal is worth reading before committing real budget to either stage. Vote-support services, including ours, exist for exactly this kind of nominate-then-vote format, and award-vote campaign planning is built around getting through both stages of a ballot shaped like Leesburg's.