Des Moines Register Female AOTW Poll: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes and who runs the Female AOTW Poll

The audience for this ballot is Iowa high school sports readers, and the organizer is The Des Moines Register, the daily newspaper published in Des Moines. Each week the Register's high school sports desk names a field of female Athlete of the Week candidates and asks readers to choose a winner. The Register's own promotion of the feature describes it as female Athlete of the Week candidates from the Des Moines metro area for a given week, which places the program squarely in the paper's prep sports coverage rather than in a standalone awards series.

Crowdsignal is the platform doing the work here, and poll.fm is the address readers type to reach it. That service gives the Register a simple single-question ballot with a live tally, and it means the voting experience is identical from week to week even as the candidate list changes. The format is a straightforward public vote, open to any reader who can reach the poll page.

This poll belongs to the best-of vertical, alongside the Register's other reader-vote features, and it is one of several Iowa public votes covered on this site. The table below gathers the fixed points a school or a supporter can rely on.

The dated record for this poll

Confirmed editions of the series sit in 2023 and 2024, which is what qualifies it as a recurring feature rather than a one-off ballot. Within each year the poll runs weekly through the prep sports calendar, so a season produces a long chain of short ballots rather than a single long voting window.

The specific ballot quoted on this page covered Aug. 25-31 and is marked closed. Its public tally showed the leading candidate at 85 percent on 1,863 votes, with the remaining candidates at 9 percent (196 votes) and 3 percent (75 votes). Those figures describe one weekly race only; every new week resets the field and the count.

Several facts about the series are not printed anywhere the organizer publishes. The Register has not printed a standing nomination window, a per-person vote limit, an eligibility text or the opening date of the next weekly ballot; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The publisher also has not announced whether the series continues into a future season, so the 2023 and 2024 editions are the confirmed span.

Anyone voting gets a simple practical takeaway. The poll is real and recurring, the weekly window is short, and the only dated anchor that carries forward is the pattern itself, a fresh ballot each week of competition, rather than any fixed calendar date printed in advance.

How a supporter votes this week

Voting takes three clicks on the Crowdsignal page. Voting starts at the current poll.fm address, where the week's candidate list appears; the supporter clicks the radio button beside one name and submits. The page then reveals the running percentage and raw vote count for every candidate, so the state of the race is visible immediately after voting and throughout the week.

No login, email entry or payment step appears on the ballot. That makes the poll one of the fastest public votes in the Iowa market to complete, and it also means a candidate's support depends entirely on how widely the poll link travels during the week it is live. A weekly ballot rewards fast, broad sharing far more than a month-long contest does, because the window closes within days.

The one thing a supporter cannot read off the ballot is whether the platform or the Register applies any limit on repeat voting from the same visitor. The ballot page states no such rule, so the published tally is the only outcome anyone can see, and the organizer's enforcement, if any, happens off the page. Supporters who want the widest reach should pair the poll link with the Register's candidate story each week, since that story is where the paper's own readers already gather.

Where this poll sits among Iowa public votes

Iowa readers meet a lot of public votes, and this poll is unusual in two ways. First, it is a newspaper sports feature, not a business ranking, so the competitors are student athletes and the audience is school communities rather than customers. Second, it is weekly, so each edition is a short sprint instead of a season-long campaign.

Its closest companions on this site are Iowa's best-of programs, which answer a different question altogether. The Best of Des Moines (CITYVIEW) and the Best of Des Moines (Business Record) both rank Des Moines businesses by category, while the Best of Cedar Rapids (The Gazette) and Cedar Rapids CommunityVotes serve the eastern side of the state. The Best of the Corridor and the AHBA Parade of Homes round out the Iowa set.

For a supporter, the difference matters in strategy. A business best-of ballot rewards weeks of steady outreach to a customer base, while the AOTW poll rewards mobilizing a school community inside a single week. The organizer is a newsroom in both cases, but the cadence, the audience and the kind of push that works are not the same, which is why each program gets its own page here.

Strengthening support in a weekly sprint

Because each AOTW ballot lives for only a few days, the useful moves are the fast ones. Post the poll.fm link as soon as the Register publishes it, attach it to the Register's own candidate story so readers have context, and ask the school community directly, since classmates, teammates and family groups are the audience most likely to click through immediately. A reminder near the end of the weekly window catches supporters who meant to vote and forgot.

The Register has printed no guidance on outside help for this poll, so the only written constraints are the platform's general terms. Nothing on the ballot page promises that unusual voting patterns will be counted, and nothing explains how the tally is protected. A supporter planning a larger push should read how award votes work and measure the organizer's silence against the risk of a tally that does not move as expected.