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

Confirmed editions since 2023, and a county-wide ballot most of Palm Beach County can enter

Confirmed editions dated 2023, 2024, 2025, and 2026 establish the Palm Beach County Community's Choice Awards as a fixture on the Palm Beach Post's own contest platform, with the 2027 awards now open. The Palm Beach Post, a Gannett-owned newspaper based in West Palm Beach, Florida, runs the ballot at palmbeachpost.gannettcontests.com, open to businesses across all of Palm Beach County rather than one city inside it.

The 2027 awards carry a confirmed window of October 12 through December 31, 2026, listed as upcoming on the Palm Beach Post's own platform. Past that window, the page stops publishing specifics: no category list and no vote cap or eligibility rule appear anywhere in what the Palm Beach Post has made public.

Treat that last row as the standing rule for this ballot: confirm on the live ballot each cycle, since even with editions dating back to 2023, the Palm Beach Post still has not published a fixed category structure the way some sister Gannett markets have.

What years of listings on the Palm Beach Post's own platform actually show

The Palm Beach Post's own contest platform preserves a multi-year paper trail for this ballot, back to 2023. Past listings for 2024, 2025, and 2026 each show three separate pages: a plain year page, one appended with "Noms" for nominations, and one appended with "Winners" once results were posted. That pattern points to a two-stage structure, nominate first, then vote, with a dedicated winners page published afterward, rather than one page mixing all three steps together.

The same palmbeachpost.gannettcontests.com host carries far more than this one ballot: 421 other promotions run through it alongside the Community's Choice Awards, at last count. Several share nothing with it beyond the platform: "Get Kalahari'd Away Fall 2026," a travel sweepstakes; "American Alternative Assets Red White & Gold," another sweepstakes; and the "2026 PFHOF Awards of Character," a separate recognition program tied to firefighters specifically. None of the three feeds into, competes with, or shares a results page with the county's own Community's Choice Awards, despite sitting on the identical Second Street platform.

Why that separation matters for a business entering

A Palm Beach County business preparing to nominate itself should expect the Community's Choice Awards link to lead somewhere specific to this ballot, not a general contest hub shared with the Post's sweepstakes offerings. Bookmarking the exact 2027 URL, rather than trusting a search result that might surface an older or unrelated listing on the same host, is the safer habit with confirmed editions dating back to 2023.

One ballot, a county's worth of separate cities

Palm Beach County, Florida stretches across dozens of separate incorporated cities and towns, each running its own local government, and the Community's Choice Awards draws nominees from the entire county rather than favoring its largest city. West Palm Beach, where the Palm Beach Post itself is based, sits near the county's population center, while Boynton Beach, home to its own separate ballot discussed below, anchors another part of the same county.

Nothing published on the Community's Choice Awards page draws a boundary tighter than the county line itself. Whichever city or smaller town inside that county a business calls home, its standing to nominate itself matches one located in West Palm Beach proper.

A separate ballot inside the same county

Boynton Beach, one of the cities inside Palm Beach County, also runs its own ballot under a different network entirely: CommunityVotes Boynton Beach, unconnected to the Palm Beach Post's Community's Choice Awards despite covering overlapping territory. A Boynton Beach business weighing both programs is looking at two different organizers, two different platforms, and two results pages that never combine.

A countywide push, built around a confirmed December 31 deadline

Confirmed editions dating back to 2023 hand a Palm Beach County business a longer stretch of precedent to point to than a brand-new ballot could offer, yet the 2027 awards still answer to one hard date: December 31, 2026. Because the Palm Beach Post draws nominees from the entire county, reaching real customers across whichever city a business actually serves outweighs assuming West Palm Beach alone decides who wins.

No per-voter limit is spelled out anywhere on the page, and that silence is not an invitation to guess at one. The Palm Beach Post runs the identical Second Street platform behind hundreds of other promotions, and irregular activity flagged under one listing tends to draw scrutiny toward an organizer's other pages too. A nomination this deep into the ballot's confirmed run is worth protecting with that in mind.

This ballot sits apart from Florida's statewide programs. Best of Florida Awards covers the entire state under a separate publisher, while Best of Miami Readers' Poll and Best of Orlando each answer to their own regional masthead, none of them the Palm Beach Post. Reading is buying votes legal before spending a dollar chasing any of these county or regional ballots pays off, and award-vote campaign planning covers the readers'-choice format this page describes directly.