2026 Metro's Best Community's Choice Awards - Noms: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Metro's Best Community's Choice Awards are and who runs them

The 2026 Metro's Best Community's Choice Awards - Noms is the nomination and voting round of The Des Moines Register's annual reader-voted competition for local businesses. The Register, Iowa's largest metro newspaper, describes Metro's Best as the annual reader-voted competition for local businesses within the communities where its Community Publications are distributed. The ballot is a best-of program in the business vertical: the Register's readers put local businesses forward and then decide the winners by public vote.

Second Street powers the form, sitting behind the Register's contest site at desmoinesregister.gannettcontests.com. The 2026 nomination round lives at the URL below, and the same host carries the main awards ballot and the winners pages for each year alongside it.

Because the ballot is a public vote, the outcome depends on how many supporters each nominated business can rally. That is the difference between this program and a judges' panel or an editorial pick: the readers of the Register's Community Publications are the jury, and the businesses that mobilize theirs do best.

The dated record: editions, the 2026 window and what is not published

The program's run reaches back to 2013, and it has been held annually ever since. On the Register's current contest host, confirmed editions cover 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026. The host carries a nomination ballot, a main ballot and a winners page for each of those years, and the 2026 cycle is the most recent edition, marked closed on the listing.

The 2026 nomination and voting window is the one dated fact that anchors this page: it opened on May 7, 2026 and closed on August 11, 2026. The platform's broader date trail for this program starts earlier in the year, with the 2023 cycle's dated trail beginning on February 15, which suggests the spring opening has varied between cycles. The Register has not posted dates for a 2027 round.

Two gaps in what the organizer publishes matter to anyone planning a push. The Register has not printed the 2026 category roster, nor any per-supporter limit or eligibility wording; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. That gap is worth taking seriously, because the category list and the voting rules are the two things a supporter most often needs before acting, and neither can be quoted from the ballot listing alone.

What is confirmed, in short: an annual program since 2013, four confirmed editions on the current host between 2023 and 2026, and a 2026 window that ran May 7 through August 11. Everything else about the rules lives on the ballot itself.

How a supporter votes in the 2026 ballot

The mechanic is a combined nomination and voting form, which Second Street types as a NominationAndVotingBallot. In practice that means a supporter's first visit is about putting a business forward: the form asks for the business name in a category, and the typed name is matched against the entries on the ballot. Once nominations are in place, the same ballot collects votes for the entries shown.

Because the Register has not published the category roster in advance, the live form is where the full list appears and nowhere else. A supporter should read it before nominating, since a business entered under the wrong category is a common way support gets wasted. The same applies to the voting rules: no per-supporter limit or eligibility wording has been printed for this ballot, so the form's own instructions while the window is open are the rule to follow.

Timing matters too. The 2026 window ran from May 7 to August 11, 2026, a stretch of roughly three months, which is longer than many readers-choice ballots allow. A business that waits until the final week has far less room to gather support than one that starts asking on day one. For the next cycle, the opening date will be posted on the Register's contest pages, and the ballot link on this page will point to the current round.

One practical note: the ballot sits on the Register's own domain, so typing the address directly rather than following a search result keeps a supporter on the genuine form.

How this ballot sits beside its Iowa neighbours

Des Moines readers have more than one readers-choice ballot to answer each year, and this program is one of several in the market. CITYVIEW runs its own Best of Des Moines ballot, and the Des Moines Business Record runs a Best of Des Moines program of its own. Both are separate organizers with separate rules, separate category lists and separate windows, so support gathered for one does not carry to another.

Beyond the metro, Iowa's best-of scene includes the Cedar Rapids CommunityVotes program, The Gazette's Best of Cedar Rapids, the Corridor Business Journal's Best of the Corridor, and the Ames HBA Parade of Homes. Every one of these has a different publisher behind it, and a business operating in several Iowa markets can appear on more than one ballot without the votes transferring between them.

What makes the Metro's Best Community's Choice Awards distinct is its publisher and its reach. The Des Moines Register anchors the state's largest metro and distributes Community Publications across its suburbs, so the ballot's audience is the Register's own readership rather than a single city's alt-weekly or business-paper audience. Its run since 2013 also makes it one of the longer-lived readers-choice programs in the state.

When a business weighs where to put its outreach, the practical comparison is audience: who reads each publication, and which readers are the customers a nomination needs to win.

Strengthening support in this ballot

Support in a combined nomination and voting ballot has two jobs: get the business nominated, then keep votes coming through the window. Start with the channels that already reach customers, an email list, a social account, a counter sign, and point each one at the live ballot with the exact category named. Vague asks underperform because supporters abandon a form when they cannot find the entry.

The Register has not published its wording on outside help or per-supporter limits for this ballot, so the safe position is to ask real customers to vote and to follow whatever rule the form states. A push padded with irregular activity can sink the whole entry, and no organizer treats that lightly. The organizer's own terms draw the line between an ordinary push and one that endangers the entry, which is why reading the live ballot first matters.

For tactics suited to a readers-choice ballot of this kind, see how to get more votes online, and for the rules question see is buying votes legal.