The Herald Best of Dubois County: How Voting Works & How to Win

Five confirmed editions, one small newspaper's ballot

2019. 2020. 2022. 2024. 2025. Five separate years, each with its own listing on Second Street, make up everything confirmed about Best of Dubois County, the readers'-choice ballot The Herald runs out of Jasper, Indiana.

The Herald built the 2025 edition at theherald.secondstreetapp.com, with voting open June 28 through July 20, 2025. Second Street is the ballot platform behind the page; Jasper, Indiana is where The Herald itself is based, and Indiana is the only state this program names anywhere on its listing.

Neither the category list nor a voting ceiling is printed there; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

What five dated listings actually establish

Each of the five confirmed years carries its own listing on Second Street: 2019, 2020, 2022, 2024, and the 2025 edition that ran June 28 through July 20, 2025. The Herald's own scheduling marks Best of Dubois County as an annual program, and its listing points to 2026 as the next expected year. An exact 2026 date is not yet posted; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

The single most useful fact here for anyone planning around a future edition: only the 2025 window is pinned down to the day, June 28 through July 20, 2025. The 2019, 2020, 2022 and 2024 listings confirm those years happened, but neither carries a day-level date the way 2025 does. A business waiting on 2026 has one clear precedent to work from, last year's dated window, and one open question, the date it lands on this time.

Why a plain web search is a risky shortcut here

Searching for "Dubois County best of" or "Jasper Indiana readers choice" risks landing on a closed 2025 page, an older listing, or one of the six other Indiana programs in the table below, none of which put a business on The Herald's own ballot. theherald.secondstreetapp.com is the address to check directly once a new year's listing goes live.

Where this ballot sits among Indiana's other reader polls

Six other programs cover different Indiana markets, and none of them share a category list, judges or results with Best of Dubois County.

A strong showing on The Herald's Jasper-based ballot carries no weight toward any of those six, and the reverse holds too. Entering several of these Indiana ballots at once means tracking a separate rule set and a separate deadline for each, since none of them coordinates with Best of Dubois County or with each other.

Nothing published for Best of Dubois County fixes a boundary at Jasper's own limits or draws a line around Dubois County specifically beyond the program's own name. What is missing is just as important as what is confirmed: the category roster, any per-voter cap, and eligibility rules all stay off the published page; confirm on the live ballot each cycle rather than borrowing an answer from one of the six programs above.

Building a push around a dated window, not a fixed calendar

Five confirmed editions give Best of Dubois County more history than some Second Street markets, but no fixed multi-year calendar comes with it, only one dated window, June 28 through July 20, 2025, and a general expectation that 2026 follows. Lining up which Jasper-area customers will actually visit theherald.secondstreetapp.com once a new listing posts matters more here than studying prior winners, since no public list of those winners is part of what's confirmed.

Real people, asked directly and asked again before a window closes, are what move a ballot like this, whatever the eventual category list or vote cap turns out to be. Automated or fake activity risks the whole entry, and that risk lands harder on a program whose most recent confirmed round is a single dated window rather than a long-running annual fixture.

Before The Herald actually posts a result for a given year and category, calling a business "entered" or "on the ballot" holds up; calling it a "winner" does not until that announcement lands. Whether buying votes is legal draws the line worth reading before committing budget to Best of Dubois County's next edition, how online contest votes work covers the mechanics behind a Second Street listing such as this one, and award-vote campaign planning applies directly to a readers'-choice format shaped like Jasper's own.