2025 Perry County Readers' Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

A county readers-choice ballot that is not its publisher's only one

Most Indiana best-of ballots covered on this site belong to one of two shapes: a statewide program or a CommunityVotes market. The 2025 Perry County Readers' Choice Awards fits neither. It is a newspaper readers-choice ballot, run by The Herald for a single county, hosted on Second Street, and it shares its publisher and its platform address with a separate Dubois County ballot.

That last point is the contrast worth opening on. The Herald operates The Herald Best of Dubois County on the same host, theherald.secondstreetapp.com, and the two are distinct programs with their own windows and their own county audiences. A supporter in Perry County has no reason to touch the Dubois County ballot, and a business nominated in Perry County gains nothing from votes arriving from Dubois readers. The publisher link does not merge them.

Against the wider Indiana field, the differences stack up. Best of Indiana runs statewide, and the CommunityVotes ballots in Evansville, Fort Wayne, Bloomington and South Bend are platform-run community programs rather than masthead products. This program stands alone in the field as the one ballot anchored to Perry County and the one whose organizer is a newspaper with a county masthead behind it.

Program facts

Those facts come from the program's own platform listing, and they are the baseline every other section here builds on.

The dated record: spring windows and two confirmed years

Confirmed editions of this program fall in 2023 and 2025, which is the basis for its annual standing on this site. Both years are evidenced on the Second Street host, where the 2023 ballot sits at its own address under theherald.secondstreetapp.com and the 2025 ballot sits at the address this page carries. No 2024 edition is documented, so the honest history is two confirmed years with a gap between them.

The 2025 window is the dated anchor for this page. It opened April 14, 2025 and closed May 13, 2025, a span of roughly four weeks in spring, and the platform now marks that ballot closed. The 2023 edition also ran in spring, with its recorded dates beginning in April. Spring is therefore the pattern the confirmed years support, not a claim about every future year.

The publisher's calendar backs the pattern up. A promotion named Perry County News Readers' Choice Awards 2026 ran on the same host from April 21 to May 18, 2026, which places a Perry County readers-choice ballot in spring for a third time under the same publisher. What no published material carries for this program is the category roster, any per-supporter vote limit and the eligibility language; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

A gap of that kind weighs less on a county ballot than it would on a large statewide program. A county readers-choice contest lives or dies on whether supporters can reach the live page during the window, and the window itself is the one dated fact a supporter needs before planning anything.

How a supporter votes on this ballot

Voting here is a straightforward public process on a Second Street ballot. A supporter opens the live ballot page, works through the categories listed there, picks a favourite in each category they care about, and submits through the platform's form. Second Street ballots of this type present the category list on the page itself, so the roster a voter sees on the live ballot is the operative one, whatever a printed flyer or a social post claims.

The home for this program's vote is the 2025 ballot address, which is the voting URL given on this page. Because each edition lives at its own address under theherald.secondstreetapp.com, a supporter typing the publisher's host alone will land on whatever promotion The Herald is currently running, which may be a sweepstakes or a different county's ballot. Reaching the correct ballot means using the full address for the current cycle.

Timing is the second half of the mechanic. The 2025 window ran April 14 to May 13, and the ballot is closed. A vote cast outside an open window goes nowhere, so the first thing a supporter should do is confirm the current cycle's dates on the live page. The return rule, meaning how frequently one person may cast votes, is not published anywhere for this program; the live form's printed instructions decide it.

There is no paid voting tier on this ballot and no account requirement stated in the material for the program, so the barrier to a vote is the window itself, not a fee.

Strengthening support while the window is open

Because this ballot is a public vote with an open-and-close window, every supporter-facing effort has the same constraint: outreach has to land between the opening date and the closing date. The 2025 window ran about four weeks, which is long enough for a repeated ask but short enough that a single announcement at the start will be forgotten by the final week. Businesses that do well on county readers-choice ballots ask more than once, through more than one channel, and always with the direct link to the live ballot rather than to the publisher's homepage.

The organizer's own rules are the boundary. The Herald has not published a vote cap or eligibility language in the material held for this program, which means a nominee cannot verify from this page whether repeat voting or block asks are welcome. The safe read is to follow the live form's instructions exactly and to treat any outside help, paid or otherwise, as subject to the organizer's discretion. Our guide to getting more votes is built around that order of operations: read the rules first, then run outreach the ballot's format actually rewards.

Nothing on this ballot suggests paid voting is part of its design, and the organizer's rules govern whatever help a nominee brings in.

Where this ballot sits among Indiana's best-of programs

Indiana's best-of field on this site splits into publisher-run and platform-run programs, and this ballot is a clean example of the first. The Herald, a newspaper group headquartered in Jasper, runs this Perry County readers-choice ballot and the separate Dubois County ballot on the same Second Street host, which makes the publisher the connective tissue between two county programs that never share an audience.

The platform-run side looks different. CommunityVotes Bloomington, Evansville, Fort Wayne and South Bend answer to a community-votes platform rather than a masthead, and Best of Elkhart County, run by The Elkhart Truth, is the closest structural cousin: a newspaper readers-choice ballot for a single Indiana county. For a business deciding where its support effort belongs, the question is which ballot its customers actually read, and for Perry County that points here.