2025 Heartland Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Heartland Choice Awards is and who runs it

The Heartland Choice Awards is a best-of style business ballot run by The Herald-Whig, a newspaper publisher rooted in Quincy, Illinois. The program sits in the readers-choice tradition common among local publishers: area businesses are nominated, supporters vote for their favorites, and the publisher presents the results as a community award. The edition this page is titled for is the 2025 cycle, and a 2026 edition is confirmed as well.

The ballot is hosted on Second Street, the balloting platform behind whig.secondstreetapp.com, at the address whig.secondstreetapp.com/2025-Heartland-Choice-Awards. The promotion is registered as a Ballot of the nomination-and-voting type, which means the program combines a nomination phase with a voting phase rather than running a plain vote alone. The mechanic is a public vote: supporters choose among the businesses on the ballot without paying to take part.

The market is Quincy, Illinois, where The Herald-Whig lists its address at 130 S. Fifth Street. The publisher is part of Quincy Media, and its ballot subdomain carries several other promotions alongside this one, including surveys and sweepstakes. The table below gathers the published facts about the program side by side.

The dated facts: editions, the 2025 window, and what is not published

The Heartland Choice Awards carries two confirmed edition years: 2025 and 2026. That pair is what puts the program in the annual column instead of the single-cycle one. The 2025 edition is the fully dated one, and the 2026 edition is confirmed through its live ballot on the publisher's Second Street subdomain. On the strength of those two years, a further cycle in 2027 is the direction the pattern points, and each new window would be announced on the ballot page itself.

The 2025 voting window ran from May 5 to July 19, 2025. That span, roughly two and a half months, is the only complete window the program's published material carries. It covers both the nomination-and-voting phases registered for the promotion, and it closed with the edition marked as finished. No nomination-phase start date is printed separately from that span.

Two facts about the program are not published anywhere in its available material. The Herald-Whig has not printed the category lineup for the ballot, so the businesses and business types in contention for any given year are visible only on the live page. The publisher has also not printed any rule limiting how often one supporter may vote, or an eligibility rule for the program; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Everything else on this page comes from what is published, and the gaps are stated as gaps rather than filled with assumptions from other contests.

How a supporter votes in the Heartland Choice Awards today

Voting in the Heartland Choice Awards is a public-vote mechanic on a Second Street ballot. A supporter opens the ballot page The Herald-Whig publishes, moves through the categories shown, and submits a choice for the businesses they want to recognize. Because the promotion is registered as a nomination-and-voting ballot, a supporter arriving early in a cycle may be asked to nominate a business first, while one arriving during the voting phase goes straight to choosing among the named contenders.

The practical sequence is short. Open whig.secondstreetapp.com/2025-Heartland-Choice-Awards in a browser. Read whatever the page asks, whether that is a nomination form or a voting form. Find the category that fits the business you have in mind, select it, and submit. If the page wants an email address or a sign-in first, that requirement comes from the publisher's configuration of the ballot for that cycle, and it is applied the same way to every supporter.

What a supporter cannot know in advance is the shape of the category list, since The Herald-Whig has not published a category lineup for the program outside the live page. The same is true of any limit on repeat voting. Both of those behaviors are set on the ballot itself, so the page a supporter lands on is the authority for that day's rules, and the vote they cast is counted under whatever the page states at that moment.

Where this ballot sits among Illinois best-of programs

The Heartland Choice Awards is one of several public-vote programs on this site in the Illinois best-of space, but it is the only one run by The Herald-Whig out of Quincy. Its nearest relation on the site is the Herald-Whig Cutest Pet Calendar Contest, which the same publisher runs in the same market. The two share an organizer and a platform but answer to different audiences: one recognizes local businesses, the other celebrates readers' pets.

The other Illinois programs nearby in kind are Sauk Valley Favorites in the Sauk Valley, Best of Chicago from the Chicago Reader, Chicago Style Weddings Best Of, and the two CommunityVotes markets, CommunityVotes Peoria IL and CommunityVotes Rockford. The BAGI Parade of Homes People's Choice rounds out the set with a building-industry angle. Every one of those belongs to a different organizer, and none of them shares a ballot with the Heartland Choice Awards.

What distinguishes the Quincy program is its publisher's ballot portfolio. The Herald-Whig's Second Street subdomain also carries surveys such as 20 Under 40 and sweepstakes promotions alongside the choice awards, which marks it as a working local-media ballot rather than a standalone contest site. For a business weighing where its effort pays off, that means the audience arriving at this ballot arrives through the publisher's own readership.

Strengthening support for a Heartland Choice Awards entry

A business competing in the Heartland Choice Awards is asking its customers to take a concrete action on a Second Street ballot, so the tactics that work are the ones that make that action easy. Put the ballot link where customers already look: receipts, counter signage, email footers, and social posts during the voting window. Because the program runs a nomination phase before voting, a business that mobilizes supporters early also protects itself against missing the cut when the voting round opens.

The Herald-Whig has not published a written policy on outside help for this ballot, which is different from publishers who print an explicit rule against voting software. That silence cuts both ways: nothing is promised to a business that buys support, and nothing is forbidden in print either. A business weighing that choice can compare options at award votes, but the organizer's unstated position is a real unknown, and the publisher retains the final say over what counts on its own ballot.