Best of Cedar Rapids (The Gazette): How Voting Works & How to Win

Three 'best of' ballots share the Cedar Rapids market, and none of them are the same contest

Three. Not one. A Cedar Rapids business chasing local recognition this year has three separate ballots to track, not the single contest most "vote for us" messaging implies.

The Cedar Rapids Gazette runs its own Best of Cedar Rapids readers-choice program at thegazette.com. Separately, CommunityVotes runs an all-category consumer ballot at cedarrapids.communityvotes.com, the one KHAK radio covered for its 2026 restaurant results. A third option, Best of the Corridor, comes from the Corridor Business Journal, a B2B ballot spanning Cedar Rapids and Iowa City together, now in its third decade, with more than 7,500 votes cast in a recent cycle. Three organizers. Three sites. Three different rulebooks.

Confusing one program's rules for another's is the mistake that actually costs a business here, a missed nomination window on a site it never checked. See the full Cedar Rapids CommunityVotes guide for that program's confirmed calendar, and the Iowa contest hub for how Cedar Rapids sits next to the state's other public-vote programs.

A newspaper running its own ballot isn't unusual in Iowa, it's just thinly documented here

A daily paper running its own readers-choice ballot is a familiar pattern in this state, not a Cedar Rapids invention. The Des Moines Register does the same thing on the sports side with its own weekly Athlete of the Week fan poll, published directly at desmoinesregister.com rather than routed through a syndicated platform. CITYVIEW takes a related but distinct approach for Best of Des Moines, running a fill-in-the-blank write-in ballot on its own dedicated voting subdomain instead of a shared platform like CommunityVotes.

The Gazette's Best of Cedar Rapids fits that same in-house instinct on the business side of the ledger. Keep the audience relationship with the newspaper itself, rather than routing it through CommunityVotes or a trade publication. That has one practical upside: a business's existing print and digital readers are already primed to see thegazette.com content, which isn't automatically true of traffic sent toward a CommunityVotes or Corridor Business Journal page.

What that overlap doesn't do is replace missing mechanics. Knowing an audience already trusts the source is not the same as knowing when a ballot opens, or what it will ask a voter to do once it does.

What the record confirms for Best of Cedar Rapids, and where it stays quiet

Organizer, domain, annual cadence, readers-choice format. That's the complete confirmed list for Best of Cedar Rapids at the time of writing. No category names, no nomination window, no voting window, and no vote cap sit alongside those four facts. Inventing one to fill the space would help nobody who actually needs to plan around this program.

Why this particular gap reads differently than its neighbors'

CommunityVotes, the other Cedar Rapids ballot, has a confirmed four-month nomination runway followed by a month-long voting window. CITYVIEW's Des Moines program has a confirmed September-through-November window, down to the day. The Gazette's own program has neither on the record checked for this guide, which makes it the thinnest-documented of the three Cedar Rapids-adjacent ballots covered on this site. That's arguably the one worth checking most often, not least, since a program this quiet about its own mechanics is also the one most likely to update them without much warning.

That gap is exactly why getting familiar with the basics of getting votes for an online contest is worth doing before assuming a specific mechanic applies here. The details that would normally anchor a campaign plan, a category name, a deadline, a cap, simply aren't published in a form this guide can verify yet.

Two confirmed Iowa ballot formats, and a third that isn't confirmed at all

CommunityVotes splits into per-category pages once its ballot opens; there's no single search box spanning every business at once. CITYVIEW skips the finalist-dropdown format entirely. Voters write in a business name directly at best.dmcityview.com, no pre-loaded list, no pay-to-play weighting tied to advertising spend. Two Iowa best-of programs, two structurally different ballots. Neither pattern can be assumed to describe The Gazette's own mechanic without confirmation.

Either format, or something else entirely, is plausible for a newspaper running a first-party ballot with no prior mechanic on record. Thegazette.com itself, checked at the start of whichever cycle is active, is the only source that actually resolves the question. For the mechanics of running an award-style push regardless of which format a ballot turns out to use, award vote campaign planning covers ground that applies to all three Cedar Rapids programs at once.

Running one campaign, two, or three, across the same Cedar Rapids customer base

Nothing in the public record for any of the three programs suggests entering one rules out entering another in the same year. A Cedar Rapids restaurant could reasonably chase a spot in KHAK's radio-covered CommunityVotes category, a mention in the Gazette's own pages, and a Corridor Business Journal nomination if it fits the B2B categories. That's three separate reminder messages, not one copied link forwarded three times.

Marion, Hiawatha, Robins, and the smaller Linn County communities around Cedar Rapids feed customers into more than one of these ballots at once. So keeping the three straight matters more here than in a market with a single dominant contest, where a business only has to get one set of rules right.

None of that changes what a legitimate push actually does: point people who already like the business toward whichever ballot is live, with the right link, at the right time. Three ballots means three timing windows to track, two of them confirmed, one of them not, and a plan built around a guess at the third is a plan built on sand. See how online contest votes work for the general mechanics, and is buying votes legal before committing budget to any of the three.