KPVI East Idaho GMC Dealers Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The one mix-up that costs a first-time voter their week

Search "Idaho athlete of the week vote" and the SBLive/SI statewide poll usually surfaces first. That is not this poll. KPVI NBC 6, the Pocatello television station, runs its own separate Fan Vote Player of the Week at kpvi.com, sponsored by East Idaho GMC Dealers, and it draws only from East Idaho programs, Pocatello, Chubbuck, and Blackfoot chief among them. Two different organizers. Two different vote counts. A Bannock County athlete could plausibly appear on both in the same week and win one without touching the other.

What the confirmed public page does not offer is a running tally. No visible margin, no posted percentage, nothing to tell a supporter from the outside whether their nominee is comfortably ahead or three votes behind before Friday afternoon. That gap is worth naming outright rather than filling with a guess. The page is also filed under KPVI's National News section rather than a dedicated sports vertical, which trips up anyone browsing by category instead of going straight to the URL.

None of that changes the basic mechanic. It is a free public vote, it runs weekly, and it closes before that week's games rather than after. For the general mechanics of running a real campaign against a similarly quiet-tally ballot, see the online vote-buying guide, and for the season-ending counterpart to a weekly poll like this one, the Idaho High School Player of the Year award runs on its own separate, once-a-year track.

Why a dealer group, and why Friday instead of the weekend

East Idaho GMC Dealers is a multi-location sponsor, not a single storefront, and that detail lines up with the poll's own footprint. A ballot that pulls nominees from Pocatello, Chubbuck, and Blackfoot benefits from a sponsor whose name already covers more than one town, rather than one dealership's local branding trying to stretch across three communities at once.

The Friday-afternoon close is the more interesting structural choice. Most East Idaho prep polls, and plenty of station-run ones nationally, wait for a weekend's worth of games to finish before closing a vote. KPVI closes ahead of that week's slate instead. That means the ballot rewards the performance that already happened, last week's game, last week's meet, not a same-week reaction to Friday night lights still to come. A supporter pushing votes Saturday morning has already missed the window; the real push has to land by Friday midday.

There is no confirmed connection between a KPVI win and IHSAA standing. The Idaho High School Activities Association runs classification, playoff seeding, and postseason entirely on its own track. A GMC-sponsored newscast vote sits alongside real football and volleyball, not inside their governing rules.

What the East Idaho footprint means for a real push

Pocatello, Chubbuck, and Blackfoot are not one school district competing with itself, they're three separate communities inside Bannock and Bingham counties that happen to share a TV market. A Blackfoot program's nominee and a Pocatello program's nominee land on the same ballot the way a Rigby nominee and a Rexburg nominee do on the statewide SBLive/SI poll, just at a smaller, more local scale. That scale is the actual advantage: a Chubbuck team parent chain or a Blackfoot booster group text can plausibly reach a meaningful share of the poll's total addressable audience in a single afternoon, something far harder to do against a statewide field.

Because there's no visible running total, the safest approach treats every day before Friday as equally important rather than saving a big push for a "final hours" moment you can't actually measure against a public number. Send the link out as soon as the week's nominee field is confirmed. A program with an active parent group chat or school social account can plausibly cover most of its reachable base before Thursday, leaving Friday morning for stragglers rather than a scramble. General turnout tactics that transfer to any station-run ballot like this one are covered in our how-to guides.

Sports fan-poll vote support exists for exactly this kind of open, real-turnout ballot with a hard weekly close, read the current kpvi.com page rules first, since the station sets and can change the mechanics week to week. For the wider slate of East Idaho and statewide programs this ballot sits alongside, see the Idaho contest hub, part of the USA contest directory.