Pharos-Tribune Readers' Choice: How Voting Works & How to Win

Logansport readers, not a statewide audience, decide this ballot

Cass County residents who pick up the Pharos-Tribune are the audience Readers' Choice is actually built for, not a statewide readership spread across Indiana. The Pharos-Tribune runs the ballot through Second Street at thepharos-tribune.secondstreetapp.com; four editions are confirmed so far: 2023, 2024, 2025, and the current 2026 Readers Choice listing.

That current edition opens nominations and voting October 28, 2026 and closes January 11, 2027, stretching across two calendar years the way each of its three prior editions has. Categories and a vote cap for this specific stretch of Cass County readers aren't published past that window, and nothing in the platform listing hints at when that might change.

Treat the last two rows as open questions a Cass County nominee still has to check directly. Confirm on the live ballot each cycle, since four editions isn't enough history to assume this year's Readers' Choice repeats last year's rules exactly.

A Cass County ballot, not one of Indiana's other reader networks

Indiana runs several separate reader-vote networks, and Pharos-Tribune Readers' Choice belongs to none of the larger ones covering the state's bigger cities. Confusing Logansport's own ballot with a CommunityVotes or YourChoiceAwards market elsewhere means comparing results that were never on the same ballot together, and it means a Cass County business's win never actually registers with whichever other network a search engine happened to surface first.

What that separation means for a Cass County nomination

A search for "Indiana readers choice" surfaces all six of those other programs about as often as it does Logansport's own ballot. thepharos-tribune.secondstreetapp.com is the address that actually settles Cass County's own standing; none of the other six results carry over to it, no matter how similar their branding looks at a glance or how close their nomination windows happen to fall.

Logansport and the towns around Cass County

Logansport, the Cass County seat, sits where the Eel River meets the Wabash River in north-central Indiana. Walton and Royal Center, both smaller Cass County towns of their own, round out the wider readership a Logansport-area business realistically reaches day to day.

Readers' Choice is one entry among 27 total promotions the Pharos-Tribune runs on its own Second Street account across the year, alongside seasonal sweepstakes and photo contests that sit apart from this ballot's own rules. None of those other promotions share a results page with Readers' Choice, so a Cass County nominee tracking this ballot specifically has no reason to follow the others.

Nothing the Pharos-Tribune has published about Readers' Choice draws a line at Logansport's own city limits, and Cass County residents from the surrounding towns regularly shop and work in Logansport itself. A business just outside Logansport proper has no obvious reason to assume Readers' Choice doesn't reach it too, especially given how much daily traffic already crosses into the city from those smaller towns.

Building support across four editions, not a single one-off ballot

Four editions gives a Cass County business a rough pattern to work from: nominations tend to open in October and the window tends to close the following January. That pattern doesn't answer what categories apply this year or whether a vote cap exists; both stay a live-ballot question every time nominations reopen, no matter how familiar the October-to-January shape has become.

A four-edition ballot earns its results the same way a longer-running one does: genuine Cass County readers returning before January 11, not a single concentrated push near the deadline. Second Street's fraud screening doesn't grade on a curve for a newer market, so the cost of getting flagged lands on Readers' Choice just as hard as it would on a program twice its age. Is buying votes legal spells out that boundary, and buying votes online covers what outside help for a nominate-then-vote ballot like Readers' Choice typically looks like.