Herald-Whig Cutest Pet Calendar Contest: How Voting Works & How to Win

Quincy's own pet-photo contest, run by its daily paper

The Cutest Pet Calendar Contest asks Quincy, Illinois pet owners to submit a photo of their pet, then puts those photos up for a public vote. The Herald-Whig, Quincy Media's daily paper, organizes it on the Second Street platform at whig.secondstreetapp.com.

Neither the category list nor a voting ceiling is printed there; confirm on the live ballot each cycle before promising a Quincy pet owner anything beyond what that table already lists.

One documented window, and a year label that doesn't mean a second cycle

The Herald-Whig lists this contest among its annual promotions, but only one dated window is actually confirmed: October 11 through November 29, 2025. The "2026" written into the program's own title refers to the calendar year the winning pet photos are meant to fill, the way a desk calendar sold in autumn always carries next year's date on its cover.

A Quincy pet owner guessing at a submission date from that title alone risks guessing wrong: assuming a second, already-run voting round for 2026 reads more into the name than the Herald-Whig has actually confirmed. Nothing published says the contest skips a year, and nothing published says it doesn't; the only place that answer will surface is whig.secondstreetapp.com itself, whenever the paper next opens a window and picks whatever address it decides to use for it.

Two other Illinois pet-photo contests, and a handful that aren't

Quincy's contest is not the only pet-photo vote run by an Illinois newspaper, though the ones that share its format are worth telling apart from the ones that don't.

The two pet-photo contests on that list run under their own separate organizers, with their own separate submission pools; a photo entered at whig.secondstreetapp.com never crosses into either one. The three business ballots share even less: a different mechanic entirely, judging businesses rather than pets, so a pet owner searching for "pet calendar" style contests can safely skip past all three. A pet already entered in either of those two other calendar contests is not automatically eligible for the Herald-Whig's own ballot simply because the formats look alike; each organizer sets and enforces its own entry rules independently of the others.

Getting a pet's photo seen once the window is open

A pet-photo contest without a published cap rewards steady attention more than one loud burst of it. Texting a handful of friends the day the window opens, then again partway through, tends to look like ordinary enthusiasm for a favorite pet. The same number of votes arriving in one unexplained minute tends to draw a different kind of attention, on a contest with only one documented cycle to point back to. A short caption explaining why the photo was submitted, refreshed once or twice across the window rather than posted only on day one, tends to keep that circle of friends coming back to vote again instead of casting a single vote and moving on.

Which photo the Herald-Whig eventually names a winner is a decision that belongs to the paper alone; a Quincy pet owner is only ever competing for a spot on that shortlist, not buying a guaranteed outcome. Anyone weighing paid outside support before entering should read is buying votes legal first, since a photo contest built on public votes carries its own compliance line to stay inside. Buying votes online breaks down how that kind of support usually works for a single-photo public vote like this Quincy contest.