Residents' Choice Award poll: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Residents' Choice Award poll is and who runs it

Most best-of ballots in Iowa answer to a city newsroom: the Business Record and CITYVIEW run the Des Moines programs, The Gazette runs Cedar Rapids, and the Corridor Business Journal covers its own corridor. The Residents' Choice Award poll sits outside that pattern. It belongs to Iowa Living Magazines, a family of locally owned lifestyle publications that describes its focus as the people, places and events of the communities it serves, and readers vote on the organizer's own website rather than on a contest platform.

That publisher structure shapes the ballot's reach. Iowa Living Magazines organizes its coverage around named communities, and the site's navigation lists Adel, Altoona, Ankeny, Bondurant, Clive, Grimes, Indianola, Johnston, Jordan Creek, North Polk, Norwalk, Urbandale, Waukee and Winterset. The Residents Choice Awards page sits inside that family of publications, so the poll is a readers-choice program for the magazine's audience across those communities rather than a single-city contest owned by one metro newsroom.

The program is a public-vote award in the best-of vertical. Supporters choose favorites and the publisher tallies the ballots; there is no jury round described on the page. The table below gathers the confirmed details of this program in a single block.

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

The Residents' Choice Award poll shows two confirmed editions, 2025 and 2026, on the Iowa Living Magazines website. Those two runs in consecutive years establish the program as a repeat fixture of the publisher's calendar, and they make up the whole edition history the page publishes: nothing before 2025 is described, so that year is the earliest confirmed edition of the poll.

The 2026 window has one printed anchor. The ballot page states that polls open August 5, 2026. The deadline is handled differently: the page directs readers to the November edition for the deadline rather than printing a standalone calendar day on the ballot itself. A supporter planning a last-week push therefore has two reference points, the August open date and the November edition, and the second of those is a publication rather than a date.

What the publisher has not put on the page matters just as much for planning. Iowa Living Magazines has not printed the full category roster for the Residents Choice Awards ballot, so readers should confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The page also carries no round dates beyond the open date, and no eligibility terms beyond the one-ballot request covered in the voting section below. Because the organizer publishes this ballot on its own domain, any of those details can change between cycles without a platform-wide announcement, which is why the live page, not a summary, is the authority for the current cycle.

How a supporter votes on the Iowa Living Magazines ballot today

Nothing about this ballot takes more than a few minutes. A supporter visits the Residents Choice Awards page on the Iowa Living Magazines website during the voting window that opened August 5, 2026, reads the categories as printed, and submits a ballot. The publisher's instruction on breadth is unusually generous: you can vote in one category, in every category, or anywhere in between. There is no requirement to complete the full form, so a reader who cares only about a favorite local business in Ankeny or a favorite spot in Waukee can cast a partial ballot and still have it count.

The frequency rule is the one printed constraint. The publisher's page asks for one ballot per voter by IP address. That phrasing does two things at once: it sets the limit at a single ballot rather than a daily return, and it defines the voter by network address rather than by an account. For a business owner rallying support, this matters in a practical way, because coworkers in the same office or family members on the same home network share an IP address, and the publisher's request treats them as one voter.

Since the organizer keeps the whole program on iowalivingmagazines.com, no contest platform intervenes between the reader and the form. There is no separate contest domain to find, no platform login flow and no round navigation. The sequence is: open the publisher's Residents Choice Awards page, fill in the categories you want, submit once, and treat the November edition as the point where the publisher closes the cycle and communicates results.

How this ballot sits beside its Iowa neighbours

Readers-choice ballots in Iowa come from several different publishers, and the Residents' Choice Award poll is set apart from every neighbour by ownership. The Best of Des Moines run by the Business Record and the CITYVIEW Best of Des Moines both serve the capital's metro audience, but each answers to a different Des Moines publisher, each prints its own calendar, and neither answers to Iowa Living Magazines. A result in one of those programs has no bearing on this poll.

East of the metro, the field splits again. The Gazette's Best of Cedar Rapids belongs to that city's daily paper, while the Cedar Rapids CommunityVotes program runs on the CommunityVotes model with its own nomination-and-vote structure. The Best of the Corridor from the Corridor Business Journal serves the corridor's business audience from a trade-publication angle, and the AHBA Parade of Homes in Ames is a homebuilders' program rather than a readers-choice ballot at all.

Against that field, the Residents' Choice Award poll is set apart because a magazine publisher whose coverage is organized around a family of named communities, not a single metro core, owns it outright. Its ballot is published on iowalivingmagazines.com, its 2026 window opened August 5, and its deadline follows the November edition. For a business weighing where to spend outreach effort, the practical consequence is that support has to come from the magazine's own readership, because the ballot's audience and the publisher's audience are the same people.

Strengthening support within this ballot's rules

This program rewards breadth inside a single ballot, which shapes what effective outreach looks like. Since each supporter can vote in one category, in every category, or anywhere in between, ask your customers to fill in every category where you appear rather than just the obvious one, and remind them the publisher asks for one ballot per voter by IP address, so a second submission from the same network is not what the organizer wants. The window that opened August 5, 2026 gives a long runway before the November edition closes the cycle, so spreading reminders across weeks beats a single announcement. For tactics that fit these constraints, see our guide to getting more votes online, and for the broader question of whether outside help is appropriate, our legality overview and award-votes page cover how purchased votes interact with publisher rules like this one-ballot request.