Lerch Bates People's Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Lerch Bates People's Choice Awards are and who runs them

Unlike the Best of Chicago poll run by the Chicago Reader or the CommunityVotes ballots in Peoria and Rockford, the Lerch Bates People's Choice Awards are a single-purpose architecture prize, not a citywide readers survey. AIA Chicago, the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects, operates the program from its Chicago base, and it does so in partnership with the Chicago Architecture Center. The award is named for Lerch Bates, and its role is to let the public, not a jury, decide which projects take the top honors.

The program sits inside AIA Chicago's wider Design Excellence Awards. Projects are submitted during the Design Excellence cycle, then the Chicago Architecture Center's docents and volunteers conduct a round one jury review and select the finalists whose designs go before the public. The people's choice round is therefore the last stage of a longer process, and the winner is the finalist the open vote favors.

That structure separates this ballot from its Illinois siblings. The Best of Chicago (Chicago Reader) spreads across dozens of consumer categories, while this program concentrates entirely on architecture, which is why its audience is narrower and its window shorter.

The dated record for the Lerch Bates People's Choice Awards

Confirmed editions of the Lerch Bates People's Choice Awards ran in 2023 and 2024, then again in 2025 and the live 2026 cycle. Each of those cycles placed the public vote in September, and the 2023 edition closed its vote on September 18 of that year, so the September anchor has held across the run.

The 2026 calendar has two distinct phases. Submissions opened during the week of May 4, 2026 and closed on Friday, June 12, 2026 at 5:00 PM central, which is when projects entered the Design Excellence pipeline. The public vote then opened September 8, 2026 and closes at 11:59 PM CT on Wednesday, September 16, 2026. That is a nine-day window, short by the standard of the month-long community ballots elsewhere in the state.

What AIA Chicago has not printed on the voting page is the roster of categories the ballot uses; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The announcement pattern is clearer: the 2025 cycle ended with a published winners announcement, and the 2023 cycle opened with a finalists announcement that invited immediate voting, so each edition produces both a finalists post and a winners post.

Because the calendar is set edition by edition, a supporter planning for 2027 should watch AIA Chicago's awards tag rather than assume the same dates repeat. The submission close in mid-June and the vote close in mid-September describe 2026, not a standing rule.

How to vote in the Lerch Bates People's Choice Awards today

Voting here takes little setup. On the page AIA Chicago publishes for the program, a supporter reviews the finalist projects and casts a vote in each category that interests them. The stated limit is one vote per email address, per category, which means one person with one email can weigh in once on every category but cannot repeat a vote in the same one.

Two details of the 2026 ballot matter to anyone voting. First, the window is short: it opened September 8 and shuts at 11:59 PM CT on Wednesday, September 16, 2026, so a missed week ends participation. Second, the finalists were not chosen by popular demand; the Chicago Architecture Center's docents and volunteers narrowed the submitted field in a round one jury review, so every option on the ballot has already passed a professional screening.

The vote itself requires no described account beyond an email address, since that is what the limit is enforced against. Anyone hoping to follow the whole program rather than just vote can read AIA Chicago's overview of the people's choice award, which explains how the public round connects to the Design Excellence Awards submissions.

For supporters of a particular firm or project, the practical move is to circulate the ballot link during the nine-day window and ask each person to vote from their own email. That respects the organizer's one-per-email rule and still reaches everyone who cares about the project.

How this ballot sits beside its Illinois neighbours

Illinois carries several public-vote programs, and the Lerch Bates People's Choice Awards differ from each of them in organizer, subject and shape. The BAGI Parade of Homes People's Choice honors homebuilder work, the Chicago Style Weddings Best Of serves the wedding market, and the Sauk Valley Favorites covers a regional consumer survey far from Chicago. None of them is run by a professional architecture association.

Within Chicago itself, the Best of Chicago (Chicago Reader) is the closest neighbour by geography but the furthest by design: it is a media-published readers poll spanning the whole city's consumer life, while the Lerch Bates ballot is a single-vertical award tied to the Design Excellence cycle and co-presented with the Chicago Architecture Center.

The downstate CommunityVotes Peoria IL and CommunityVotes Rockford ballots share the people's-choice naming convention but answer to a national community-votes publisher, not to AIA Chicago. Their windows, categories and rules are set separately, so nothing on this page transfers to them.

What makes the Lerch Bates program distinctive is the professional filter before the public vote. Finalists reach the ballot only after the Chicago Architecture Center's docents and volunteers review the submitted designs, so the public chooses among vetted architecture rather than nominating from scratch. That two-stage design is the clearest structural difference between this award and every sibling listed above.

Strengthening support for a finalist project in this ballot

Supporters of a finalist project work within a narrow window and a strict limit. The 2026 vote runs September 8 through 16, and AIA Chicago allows one vote per email address, per category, so the only honest way to add weight is to reach more distinct supporters, each voting once from their own email before the 11:59 PM CT close on September 16.

AIA Chicago's stated rule is the boundary to respect: the limit is per email address, per category, and the organizer publishes it directly on the ballot page. A push that asks each colleague, client and project follower to cast their own single vote fits the rules; anything engineered to multiply votes past that limit does not, and the organizer's page gives no indication that bulk or automated participation is welcome.

Timing matters more here than on month-long ballots. With nine days total, a reminder sent in the final forty-eight hours catches supporters who meant to vote and forgot, and pairing the ask with the project's Design Excellence context gives people a reason to care. For outreach and reminder cadence that work on any public vote, see how to get more votes online, and for the broader legal picture see whether buying votes is legal.