2026 Best of Story County Community's Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Best of Story County ballot is and who counts the votes

The 2026 Best of Story County Community's Choice Awards is a readers-choice business ballot run by the Ames Tribune, the daily newspaper whose masthead has covered Ames, Iowa, for decades. The program is a classic best-of format: residents of Ames and the wider Story County area nominate the local businesses they rate, then a public vote decides which nominees come out on top. The mechanic is public-vote, meaning the outcome is decided entirely by supporters casting ballots rather than by a judging panel.

The balloting is hosted on Second Street, a platform that specializes in newspaper readers' choice promotions, and the Ames Tribune serves it from its contest domain at amestrib.gannettcontests.com. The main ballot for the 2026 edition lives at amestrib.gannettcontests.com/2026-Best-of-Story-County-Communitys-Choice-Awards, with separate nomination and winners pages beside it.

Key facts at a glance

For anyone comparing Iowa readers' choice ballots, this one is the Story County entry in a state where several publishers run their own versions, from the Best of Des Moines (Business Record) to the Best of the Corridor.

The dated record for this ballot, 2023 through 2026

The confirmed edition history for the Best of Story County Community's Choice Awards opens in 2023 and now spans four editions, 2023 through 2026. Every year in that run carries a full set of pages on the Ames Tribune's Second Street host, a main ballot, a nominations page and a winners listing, which is what marks the program as an annual fixture rather than a single-season promotion.

The 2026 cycle is the most precisely dated. Its voting window ran from August 3 to August 18, 2026, registered on the Second Street platform as a Ballot/VotingBallot promotion, and that window is now closed. The platform's date trail for the program as a whole reaches back to a start date of June 2, 2023, which frames how long the Ames Tribune has been cycling this contest through the summer.

Two things about the ballot are not printed anywhere this site can quote: the list of categories the ballot carries, and the rules on vote caps, one-vote-per-day limits or eligibility, so those are matters to confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

What the page trail does establish is the shape of a cycle. A nomination round opens first, the main voting ballot follows, and a winners page closes the edition out. If the Ames Tribune follows its 2023 to 2026 pattern, the 2027 edition would carry the same three-page structure on the same contest domain.

How a supporter votes on the Ames Tribune ballot today

Voting in this program is a literal sequence on the ballot form itself. A supporter opens the current ballot page on amestrib.gannettcontests.com, signs in or registers with an email address, works through the categories the form presents, selects the local business they want in each one, and submits. That is the whole mechanic: no purchase, no fee and no judging entry are involved on the supporter's side.

The nomination round works the same way but earlier in the cycle. In every edition from 2023 to 2026 the Ames Tribune has published a dedicated nominations page alongside the main ballot, which means a business that wants to appear on the voting ballot first has to be written in or nominated during that opening round. Missing the nomination window has cost businesses their shot at the ballot in readers' choice programs of this shape.

Because the 2026 window closed on August 18, the live page at this moment shows the closed ballot and its winners listing. A supporter planning for the 2027 edition should return when the Ames Tribune opens its next nominations round and treat the printed rules on that form as the operative ones. The exact registration steps, any email verification and the frequency of voting are all set by the ballot itself, and the Ames Tribune has not published them anywhere separate from the form.

How this ballot sits beside the other Iowa readers' choice programs

Story County's ballot is not the only readers' choice contest in Iowa, and the differences between them matter to a business deciding where to invest effort. The nearest analogue by publisher type is the Best of Des Moines (Business Record), a capital-city business ballot run by a different publisher with its own dates and rules. CITYVIEW's Best of Des Moines covers the same metro from an entertainment angle.

East of Story County, the Cedar Rapids market has two separate programs, the Best of Cedar Rapids (The Gazette) from the Gazette and the Cedar Rapids CommunityVotes ballot, each answering to its own publisher. The Corridor Business Journal's Best of the Corridor spans the Cedar Rapids and Iowa City corridor as a regional business ballot.

Closer to home, the Ames HBA Parade of Homes is the other Ames-area program listed on this site, though it is a home-showcase ballot rather than a business readers' choice. What sets the Best of Story County Community's Choice Awards apart is its county-wide scope under a single Ames masthead: the Ames Tribune counts votes from the whole county, not just the city of Ames, and its nomination round gives newer businesses a route onto the ballot that a fixed entrant list would not.

Each program is listed separately on this site, so a business with customers in more than one market can compare them directly.

Strengthening support for a Story County nominee

The tactic that fits this ballot follows from its two-round shape. In the nomination round, a business needs enough distinct supporters to write it in, so the practical move is to ask regular customers directly and give them the exact nominations link rather than a homepage to hunt through. Once the voting round opens, the same ask repeats against the main ballot page, since the Ames Tribune's cycle has put nominations and voting on separate pages every year from 2023 to 2026.

The Ames Tribune has not printed any statement about outside help, purchased support or organized voting pushes for this ballot. That gap cuts both ways: there is no printed ban quoted here, and there is no printed permission either, so the organizer's rules on the live form are the only authority. A business weighing purchased votes should read what this site says about how vote packages are delivered and what buying award votes involves before committing anything.

The cheapest genuine edge is timing. The 2026 voting window ran from August 3 to August 18, a short span for a full ballot, so a support plan built around the first week of the window reaches more of the ballot's life than one built around the deadline.