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

A weekly school honor roll, not a business best-of ballot

Most public-vote programs attached to Des Moines ask readers to rank businesses: the Best of Des Moines ballot from CITYVIEW and the Business Record's own Best of Des Moines both hand out commercial titles. The Des Moines Register Male AOTW Poll sits in the same Iowa market but answers a different question entirely. It is an athlete of the week honor roll for male high school athletes, published by the Des Moines Register, the statewide newspaper whose publisher is Register Media.

That difference shapes everything about the ballot. Where a best-of contest runs a long season with dozens of categories, the AOTW program runs as a series of short weekly rounds, each naming a handful of nominees tied to Iowa high school communities. The confirmed ballot carried nominees connected to Ankeny, Algona, Des Moines and West Des Moines, which shows the paper pulling from the whole metro and beyond rather than from Des Moines city limits alone.

The host is Crowdsignal, reached through poll.fm, and the voting address for the confirmed round is poll.fm/14292179. The Register treats each weekly ballot as its own page: a nominee list, a vote control, and running totals. There is no nomination form for readers to file and no business paying for placement, because the nominees are athletes the paper's sports desk has already singled out.

The dated record: 2023, 2024 and the Aug. 25-31 ballot

The program's confirmed edition years are 2023 and 2024, which is what qualifies it as an annual series rather than a single experiment. Within those editions the Register ran the poll as a weekly sequence during the fall sports season, and the round that anchors this page is the male AOTW ballot covering Aug. 25-31, hosted at poll.fm/14292179 and now marked Poll Closed.

That closed ballot is also the program's fullest published result. The Des Moines nominee finished at 65 percent with 1,839 votes. The Ankeny nominee took 27 percent on 773 votes, and the Algona nominee drew 4 percent on 100 votes, with a West Des Moines nominee also on the list. Publishing raw totals beside percentages is the Register's habit on these ballots, and it makes the margin of victory plain to any reader.

What the paper leaves off the page matters just as much. The Register does not print a standing list of poll categories, a per-supporter vote limit, or exact open and close dates for every weekly round; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The publisher has also not announced an edition year beyond 2024, so whether the male AOTW series returns in 2026 is a gap readers should watch for on the Register's sports pages rather than assume.

How a supporter votes on the live AOTW ballot

The mechanic is deliberately simple, and it has to be, because a weekly round only stays open for days. A supporter opens the current ballot on Crowdsignal, reads a short nominee list in which each athlete is identified by school and town, selects a choice, and presses the vote control. The page then displays the running percentage and raw vote count beside every school, exactly as the Aug. 25-31 round displayed 1,839 votes for the Des Moines nominee while it was live.

Nothing on the confirmed ballot required a Des Moines Register subscription or a poll.fm account to reach the vote control, and the Register has not printed an eligibility rule for AOTW supporters. What the paper also has not printed is a repeat-vote policy, meaning neither a daily-return allowance nor a block on repeat voting is stated anywhere on the AOTW pages, so the live ballot's own behavior is the only authority on how often a vote registers.

Timing is the supporter's real job. Because each round covers a single week of the fall season, a school community that waits for the weekend has already lost most of the window. The practical rhythm is to find the ballot early in the week it opens, share the poll.fm address through the school's own channels, and treat the published totals as the scoreboard. When a round closes, as the Aug. 25-31 ballot has, the totals freeze and no further action moves them.

Where this ballot sits among Iowa's public-vote programs

Iowa's public-vote map splits cleanly into two kinds of ballot, and the Register's AOTW poll is the clearest example of the smaller kind. The state's best-of contests, such as the Gazette's Best of Cedar Rapids, Cedar Rapids CommunityVotes and the Corridor Business Journal's Best of the Corridor, run long seasonal campaigns where businesses campaign for months. The AOTW poll compresses that into a weekly sprint with a handful of nominees.

The contrast runs deeper than length. A best-of ballot's nominees are businesses with marketing budgets and customer bases, so the vote becomes a loyalty contest. The AOTW ballot's nominees are high school communities, which means the voting strength comes from students, families and booster networks mobilizing for a week. The Aug. 25-31 result makes the pattern visible: the Des Moines nominee's 1,839 votes represent a school community that organized, not a business with an advertising spend.

Even within Des Moines the two shapes coexist. A reader of this page may well also follow the CITYVIEW or Business Record best-of ballots, but the skills transfer only partly, because a weekly honor roll rewards speed and school reach while a seasonal best-of rewards sustained customer campaigning. The award-votes page treats the two formats separately for that reason, and anyone following several Iowa ballots at once should expect different rhythms from each publisher.

Strengthening support in a weekly Register ballot

A weekly honor roll rewards preparation more than persuasion. Before the Register posts a new male AOTW round, the school community that will back a nominee should already have its channels ready: the athletic department's social accounts, class group chats, and booster club mailing lists. When the poll.fm address goes live, those channels carry it within hours, which is how the Des Moines nominee built a commanding lead on the Aug. 25-31 ballot while rivals with equally strong programs finished far back.

The Register has not printed a rule on outside help for its AOTW rounds, so the safe reading is the one that applies to any editorial poll: support that looks like genuine community participation is what these ballots are designed to measure, and anything that reads as automation puts a nominee's standing at risk. The organic-growth guide stays inside that line, and readers weighing paid support can compare it against the service overview before deciding anything.

Speed matters more here than in any seasonal best-of contest, because a weekly window gives a school community days, not months, to act.