Best Costume: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Best Costume contest is and who runs it

Best Costume is a public-vote award that 41NBC, the television station serving Macon, Georgia, runs for its audience. The station hosts the ballot on Second Street, a contest platform used by broadcasters and publishers, at the address 41nbc.secondstreetapp.com/Best-Costume. The promotion is registered as a user-generated photo vote, which means the entries supporters see on the ballot are costume photos submitted through the platform rather than a fixed list of nominated businesses.

The programme sits inside 41NBC's wider Second Street portfolio. The same host carries the station's Value Club sweepstakes, a 2026 Q4 $15,000 Sweepstakes, a winners form for the station's Viewers Choice Awards, a Graduation Nation photo gallery, and school-focused promotions such as Give Your School A Scholarship 2026. Best Costume is the costume-themed entry in that lineup, and it is the only member of the group built as a photo voting ballot in September 2026.

The table below gathers everything confirmed about the programme in a single place: the organizer, the platform, the market, the format and the window. Details the listing does not carry, such as prize arrangements or judging stages, are not described here, and the ballot as it appears while voting is open settles anything beyond this table.

The dated facts: editions, the 2026 window and what is unpublished

Only a single edition of Best Costume is confirmed. The 2026 ballot opened on September 1, 2026 and closes on September 29, 2026, a voting window that runs entirely inside September. Those dates and the promotion type come from the Second Street platform listing for 41NBC, and the ballot is open now.

This is the first confirmed edition; whether it returns next year is not yet published; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Beyond the window dates, the listing leaves several facts unstated. 41NBC has not printed the costume category list or any per-supporter voting limit on the ballot; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Eligibility rules for entrants, prize details and any nomination round before voting are likewise absent from the listing. No recurrence schedule appears either: the ballot reads as a recurring award by name, but nothing published states a next edition year.

For a supporter planning around the calendar, the practical summary is short. Voting runs September 1 through September 29, 2026, and the close date is the hard edge of the promotion. Anything after September 29, 2026, including a 2027 edition, is not stated on the listing, so a return date would have to be announced on the ballot page itself if the station schedules a follow-up.

How a supporter votes on the Best Costume ballot today

Voting in Best Costume happens on the Second Street ballot at 41nbc.secondstreetapp.com/Best-Costume. A supporter opens the page in a browser, views the photo entries that have been submitted, chooses a favorite and submits the vote through the on-page form. Because the promotion is registered as a user-generated photo vote, the entries are pictures rather than text listings, so supporters are comparing actual costume photos when they choose.

The listing does not state whether voting requires an email registration, how often a supporter may vote, or whether the same person can vote from a phone and a desktop in the same session. Those mechanics are controlled by the ballot itself, and the form will surface whatever rules 41NBC has configured, such as a login prompt or a limit message, at the moment of submission.

Practical advice follows from the format. Photo ballots reward entries with clear, well-lit images, since supporters make quick decisions from a gallery. Anyone backing a specific entry should open the ballot directly rather than searching for it, confirm the intended entry is on the current ballot, and submit before the September 29, 2026 close. If the form reports a voting limit, that message is the operative rule for this ballot, and repeating the attempt past it risks the vote not counting.

Where Best Costume sits among Georgia ballots and 41NBC's own promotions

Best Costume is a small, single-market ballot inside a crowded Georgia field. The sibling programmes covered on this site are the Athens Community's Choice Awards, Best of Augusta, Best of Atlanta, Best of Cobb, Best of Forsyth, and Best of Middle Georgia. Each of those is a broad best-of ballot spanning many business categories; Best Costume is narrower, a single themed photo vote run by a Macon television station.

Within 41NBC's own Second Street host, the neighbours differ in kind. The station runs sweepstakes such as the 2026 Q4 $15,000 Sweepstakes and the Great Grocery Give Away $5,000 Sweepstakes, a Graduation Nation photo gallery, and the Give Your School A Scholarship ballot. Best Costume differs from all of those because the outcome is decided by public votes on photo entries rather than by a random draw or a judging panel.

When choosing where to direct attention, the distinction matters. A vote in Best Costume supports a single costume entry inside a September window. A vote in Best of Middle Georgia or the Athens Community's Choice Awards supports a business across a category list that changes with the cycle. The two formats reward different kinds of campaigns, and an entrant in a photo vote competes only against the other photos on the same ballot.

Building support for a Best Costume entry before the September close

Support in Best Costume is built on getting people to the ballot and to the right photo entry. The confirmed window runs to September 29, 2026, so outreach has a hard deadline, and the entry a supporter is meant to vote for has to be visible on the ballot when they arrive. The most reliable tactics are direct ones: send the ballot link together with the entry's name, ask supporters to vote and to forward the link to their own circles, and schedule reminders ahead of the close date rather than after it.

41NBC's listing does not publish rules on outside help or voting tools, so entrants should follow whatever the ballot form states at submission and avoid any method the form itself rejects. For a broader view of methods that do not depend on this ballot's specific configuration, see our guide on getting more votes online, and for the award-ballot format in general see our award votes page.