2025 BEST OF DUBOIS COUNTY: How Voting Works & How to Win

What Best of Dubois County is and who runs it

Most Indiana ballots on this site are either statewide or city-scoped. This one is different in a specific way: it belongs to a single daily newspaper and to the county that paper covers. The 2025 BEST OF DUBOIS COUNTY ballot is run by The Herald, which describes itself as a daily, community newspaper publishing Tuesday through Saturday, and the program's state evidence ties it to Jasper, Indiana. The organizer's identity is not in doubt; the promotion sits on the publisher's own Second Street account.

The format is the standard best-of shape. Local businesses compete across categories, the public votes, and the paper publishes the outcome to its readers. What makes it worth its own page rather than a line under a statewide program is the publisher: The Herald answers for this ballot alone, so its dates, its categories and its rules are not shared with any other Indiana program.

The platform matters for how a supporter experiences it. Second Street is a commercial balloting provider used by newspapers across the country, and the publisher's whole promotion calendar lives under one Second Street address. That means the Best of Dubois County ballot sits beside the paper's other promotions on the same host, and a supporter who has voted in one Herald promotion already knows the interface.

The dated record: which editions ran and when

This program's confirmed edition years number five: 2019, 2020, 2022, 2024 and 2025. That list is worth reading closely, because it shows a recurring program with gaps rather than an unbroken run; no edition year appears for 2021 or 2023. The recurrence is real, but so are the holes, and anyone planning around the ballot should treat the published year list, not an assumption of continuity, as the truth.

The 2025 edition carries the fullest dates. Its voting window ran from June 28, 2025 through July 20, 2025, and the ballot is now closed. That window is roughly three summer weeks, which is typical of the seasonal best-of ballots newspapers run to draw their readers' attention while local spending is at its highest.

The organizer leaves off the page the detail a competitor most wants. The category roster is not printed in the material held for this program, and neither is any rule about how often one person may vote, whether an account is required, and who qualifies to cast a ballot. Those are exactly the facts that decide a campaign, and the honest position is that they sit on the live ballot, not in a summary; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

One more dated note belongs here. The publisher's platform later carried a 2026 edition of the same title, listed as 2026 BEST OF DUBOIS COUNTY 5, with a voting window from June 22 through July 13, 2026. That is a separate promotion row on the same host, and it shows the program continuing past the 2025 edition named on this page.

How a supporter votes today

Voting here is a plain public ballot. A supporter heads to the ballot page on Second Street, works through the categories as printed on the live ballot, picks the Dubois County business they want to back in each, and submits. There is no separate nomination round in the material for this program; the promotion type is Ballot/VotingBallot, which means the public votes directly on the entries rather than first proposing them.

Right now the practical answer for anyone wondering how to take part is that the 2025 ballot closed on July 20, 2025, so the page shows a closed edition. When the next window opens, it will live on the same theherald.secondstreetapp.com address under the new edition's own page, and the steps a supporter follows will be the same shape: open the page, read the categories, choose, submit.

The details that usually trip supporters up are exactly the ones this program does not publish in its summary material. Whether a supporter may return daily, whether a login gates the ballot, and how the platform treats repeat votes are all rules kept out of what is held here. A supporter should follow whatever instructions the live ballot prints instead of assuming the habits of another ballot carry over, because Second Street ballots are configured per promotion and the organizer sets those switches for each edition separately.

How this ballot sits beside its Indiana neighbours

Indiana readers-choice voters have a crowded field to choose from, and this ballot's position in it is easy to state. The statewide option, Best of Indiana, covers the whole state, while the CommunityVotes family runs city programs in Bloomington, Evansville, Fort Wayne and South Bend. Up north, the Elkhart Truth runs its own county program, Best of Elkhart County.

Against that field, Best of Dubois County is the only one of these anchored on Dubois County and on a single daily paper in Jasper. A vote cast here supports a business in this paper's circulation area and nothing else; the statewide ballot and the city programs do not share a tally with it, and no vote moves between programs.

The host is also worth noting for contrast. The Herald's Second Street account carries the whole promotion calendar, and alongside the readers-choice ballots it has run sweepstakes promotions, including quarterly prize drawings listed for 2026. That mix is normal for a newspaper platform, but it means a supporter typing the publisher's address may land on a sweepstakes instead of the ballot, so the direct edition URL is the reliable way in.

For a business owner deciding where to invest effort, the differences that matter are scope and rules. This ballot is scoped to one county and run by a paper whose readers are that county's residents, which makes local word of mouth unusually effective here compared with a statewide ballot where the audience is dispersed.

Strengthening support in this program

Because this ballot is scoped to one county and run by a daily paper whose readers live there, the support that works is local and repeated. Ask customers face to face at the counter while the window is open, put the ballot link in the business's own social posts, and remind people more than once, since a single mention in the first week of a roughly three-week window is easily forgotten by the closing date.

On the question of outside assistance, The Herald has printed no position in the material held for this program, so no claim can be made either way about whether purchased or automated support is permitted or how it would be treated. The organizer's terms live on its own ballot page, and reading them before spending anything is the only safe order of operations. For a plain-language walkthrough of the options and the risks, see our award-votes page, and for the wider question of what organizers typically allow, the legality page covers it.

Compared with a statewide ballot, timing carries extra weight here. With a market this concentrated, a handful of loyal customers voting early and mentioning the ballot to others can move a category, so the cheapest lever is simply making sure those customers know the window is open before it closes.