Halloween Costume Contest 2025 (statesboroherald): How Voting Works & How to Win

A costume photo vote, not a business ballot

Most Georgia public-vote programs covered on this site are readers-choice rankings: local businesses compete by category and readers pick their favorites. The Statesboro Herald's Halloween Costume Contest 2025 is built differently, and that difference is the right place to start. Its promotion type on the Second Street platform is UGCVoting/UGCVotingPhoto, a format where individual contestants submit photographs and the public votes on them. The thing being judged is a costume, entered by a person or a family, not a business competing for a year-long marketing title.

The organizer is the Statesboro Herald, a newspaper published in Statesboro, Georgia. The ballot sits on the publisher's own corner of the Second Street platform, at statesboroherald.secondstreetapp.com, alongside everything else the paper promotes there. That host also carries sweepstakes and ballots such as Best of the Boro 2026 and the Discovering Bulloch 2026 Readers Choice Awards, but each of those is a separate program with separate rules. Casting a vote in the costume contest involves nothing from the others.

For a supporter, the practical consequence of the photo format is that encouragement travels person to person. A costume contestant's natural audience is friends, family and coworkers, which shapes how votes are gathered. Anyone weighing outside help can start with this site's overview of buying votes online, but the mechanics of this ballot, described below, matter first.

The dated record for the Halloween ballot

Three editions of this program are confirmed: 2023, 2024 and 2025. That span qualifies the Halloween Costume Contest as an annual program on the publisher's calendar. Each edition received its own address on the Second Street host, with the year embedded in the path, so the 2024 edition and the 2025 edition can be told apart by their ballot addresses alone.

The 2025 window is the most precisely dated. It opened on October 20, 2025 and closed on November 4, 2025, a stretch that covers Halloween itself and the days after. The promotion status is now closed, which means the ballot no longer accepts votes. A seasonal contest fitting a late-October holiday makes the fall slot a sensible expectation for future editions, though the publisher has not printed the 2026 dates anywhere in the materials behind this page.

Several facts a voter might want are absent. The publisher does not list the ballot's category structure in the materials used here, and no vote cap, repeat-voting rule or entry eligibility text travels with the confirmed facts. Anyone planning an entry strategy or a voting routine should read the rules panel on the live ballot; categories and any ceiling on repeat visits are things to confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

One more boundary is worth stating plainly. Best of the Boro 2026, the publisher's business ranking, ran August 24 to August 31, 2026. That date range belongs to a different program, and borrowing it for the costume contest would misstate the calendar.

How a supporter votes on the Second Street ballot

Voting here is a browser task on the Second Street platform. A supporter opens the ballot page for the current edition, browses the submitted costume photos, selects an entry, and completes the ballot's confirmation prompts. No purchase, no fee and no registration beyond whatever the ballot itself asks for is part of the confirmed format. The UGCVotingPhoto setup means the entries are pictures, so choosing whom to support is a visual decision rather than a search through business categories.

Timing is the main constraint. The confirmed 2025 window ran October 20 through November 4, and once the end date passes the ballot stops accepting votes and shifts to showing results. A supporter who waits until after closure cannot vote at all, no matter how strong the encouragement campaign was. Entrants who want a real chance should recruit their voters early in the window rather than in its final hours, when rivals are pushing hardest.

Repeat voting is where the ballot's own rules panel becomes essential. This guide holds none of the program's per-voter settings, so a supporter who plans to return daily, or to vote from several devices, should read what the live ballot says before assuming anything. Second Street enforces whatever settings the publisher chose, and those settings can differ between a photo contest and a business ballot on the same host.

For contestants weighing a broader push, the practical reading of public-vote mechanics across programs is collected in our votes guide, and the compliance question sits on its own page. Both describe general practice; the ballot's rules always govern this specific contest.

Where this ballot sits among Georgia vote programs

Within the Statesboro Herald's own promotion calendar, the costume contest is the seasonal outlier. The publisher's heavier vote programs are Best of the Boro, a business ballot that ran August 24 to 31, 2026, and the Discovering Bulloch 2026 Readers Choice Awards, which ran March 16 to April 4, 2026. Around them sit sweepstakes such as the 2026 Q4 $15,000 Sweepstakes and photo contests like the Back to School photo contest 2026. The Halloween Costume Contest is the only one keyed to costumes, and its fall window keeps it clear of the others on the calendar.

Across Georgia, other covered programs answer to different publishers. The Athens Community's Choice Awards, Best of Augusta, Best of Atlanta, Best of Cobb, Best of Forsyth and Best of Middle Georgia each carry their own rules, windows and category structures. A vote limit learned on one of those ballots, or a category scheme borrowed from one, says nothing about how the Statesboro Halloween ballot behaves.

What makes this program distinctive in the state's lineup is its subject. Business rankings dominate the Georgia coverage; a costume photo vote is personal, seasonal and small-audience by nature. That shape suits person-to-person encouragement and makes early recruitment the decisive habit. Supporters keeping up with several Georgia ballots should treat each publisher's rules as its own document, because none of them share a rulebook.