Ankeny's Best Community's Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

Ankeny's own readers'-choice ballot, and four years of it now confirmed

The Des Moines Register runs Ankeny's Best Community's Choice Awards on its own Second Street ballot platform, reachable at desmoinesregister.gannettcontests.com. Four editions are confirmed to date, 2023 through 2026, and the most recent of those, the 2026 edition, has already closed: its winners page confirms results on February 27 and 28, 2026.

Each edition follows a recognizable three-stage shape in its own web address: a nomination round, a main voting ballot, and finally a winners page once tallying wraps. That pattern shows up across the 2024 and 2025 editions as well as 2026, though the confirmed listing here doesn't spell out exact calendar dates for when nominations themselves open or close.

Neither the category list nor a voting ceiling is printed there; confirm on the live ballot each cycle, since four editions in, Ankeny's own page still leaves both unsettled.

Des Moines runs more than one 'best of' ballot; Ankeny's answers only to its own

The Des Moines Register publishes reader ballots beyond Ankeny's own, and several unrelated publishers run separate polls across the same metro. None of them share a results page or a judging process with this one.

A win logged on any one of those six carries no standing on desmoinesregister.gannettcontests.com, and the reverse holds too: Ankeny's four confirmed editions answer only to the readers who actually clicked through on this specific ballot.

Why a search engine can point the wrong direction here

Both "Best of Des Moines" ballots above sit one search away from Ankeny's own page, and a business chasing the wrong one loses an entire nomination window to the mix-up. Bookmarking desmoinesregister.gannettcontests.com directly, rather than trusting whatever result ranks first, keeps a campaign aimed at the right ballot.

Ankeny's own results under The Des Moines Register's masthead

The Des Moines Register carries Ankeny's Best Community's Choice Awards under its own masthead, the same organizer behind the other Des Moines-area ballots listed above. Nobody reading desmoinesregister.gannettcontests.com finds a stated limit on which businesses can enter or which supporters can back one.

No county, neighboring town, or wider service territory gets spelled out anywhere on the confirmed listing; Ankeny is the only place name printed against this ballot. Whatever coverage area The Des Moines Register actually claims for its own newsroom is a separate matter entirely; confirm on the live ballot each cycle rather than assuming a boundary that has not actually been printed.

That narrow footprint cuts both ways for a nominated business. Four straight confirmed editions already give this Ankeny-specific ballot its own separate standing among the other Des Moines-area programs above, without leaning on any wider-readership claim the confirmed listing itself never makes.

Planning around four confirmed cycles, not a guessed-at fifth

Four straight confirmed editions give Ankeny's ballot more history than plenty of comparable programs get. That history says little, though, about exactly when a 2027 edition might open its own nomination round; nothing published carries that date yet.

The steadiest approach for a business is asking real customers to click through once a round does open, then following up more than once rather than relying on a single message near any deadline. Second Street ballots, like this one, are built to flag traffic that behaves like an automated push rather than ordinary supporters, and a program with four editions of history still isn't immune to that kind of scrutiny.

A nomination and a win are two separate outcomes, and only The Des Moines Register's own process settles the second. Is buying votes legal lays out the boundary between promotion and risk before any budget goes toward a fifth Ankeny cycle. Buying votes online walks through what outside help typically covers for a ballot shaped like this, and award-vote campaign planning is built around exactly this kind of readers'-choice structure.