Best of the Quad Cities (Quad City Times): How Voting Works & How to Win

What Quad City Times actually confirms, and what it doesn't

qctimes.com/contests/best-of-the-quad-cities. That URL and the readers-choice format itself are the two things Quad City Times has actually put on the record. No public category list, no fixed close date, and no vote cap have surfaced anywhere on the paper's site, so this page treats the live ballot page as the only authority on those specifics rather than filling gaps with a guess dressed up as fact.

That's a narrower confirmed footprint than some sibling Iowa programs, and it's worth saying plainly instead of padding around it. What the confirmed facts do establish is enough to plan around: who runs it, where it lives online, and the general shape of how a reader casts a vote.

A business owner searching for how this ballot works deserves that honesty over an invented category list borrowed from a different paper's contest. See the Iowa contest hub for the state's other confirmed readers-choice and fan-vote pages.

Where this ballot sits among Iowa's other readers-choice programs

Iowa runs at least three separate business readers-choice contests, and Quad City Times' is the one whose readership crosses a state line. Cedar Rapids CommunityVotes covers Linn County alone. CITYVIEW's Best of Des Moines runs a confirmed fill-in-the-blank write-in ballot with no dropdown at all. Quad City Times covers a metro that Iowa doesn't fully contain on its own.

That bistate reach changes the practical math for a campaign more than the ballot mechanic does. A Davenport bakery and a Cedar Rapids bakery are both chasing a "best of" title, but only one of them has to think about readers who wake up in a different state. See the Cedar Rapids CommunityVotes guide and the Best of Des Moines guide for how those two ballots run in detail.

The mechanics that are confirmed, and the ones that aren't yet

Readers-choice is a specific, recognizable format: readers pick from businesses under named categories, as opposed to a raw write-in field or a single-business vote page. That much Quad City Times confirms for Best of the Quad Cities. What isn't confirmed is whether voting allows one ballot per reader, repeats on a schedule, or opens a fixed window each year the way CITYVIEW's September through November stretch does.

Rather than borrow a competitor's calendar and present it as this contest's, the honest move is naming the gap. A campaign planning around this ballot should check qctimes.com/contests/best-of-the-quad-cities directly for the current cycle's open and close dates before committing a marketing budget to a specific week.

For general mechanics that apply across most award-style or readers-choice pushes regardless of the specific paper running them, award-style vote campaigns covers that ground. A restaurant weighing a food-category nomination specifically may also find the restaurant vote campaign guide useful once the exact category names are confirmed on the live ballot.

Why the river, not the state line, defines this metro

Davenport and Bettendorf sit on the Iowa bank. Rock Island, Moline, and East Moline sit directly across the Mississippi in Illinois, close enough that residents cross bridges between them daily for work, shopping, and school. Quad City Times' own coverage treats that whole cluster as one metro rather than splitting it at the state line, which is exactly why "best of the Quad Cities" and not "best of eastern Iowa" is the contest's actual name.

LeClaire, Eldridge, Long Grove, Walcott, Princeton, and Blue Grass round out the smaller Scott County communities on the Iowa side. A business in any of these towns is part of the same readership base Quad City Times serves, whether or not it sits inside Davenport's city limits proper.

A generic "vote for us" post assumes the reader already knows which side of the river the business is on. A specific one names the town, since a Bettendorf shop and a Moline shop both have real, overlapping customer bases who might otherwise assume a Quad Cities contest is Iowa-only, or Illinois-only, and skip voting on that wrong assumption alone.

Reading a Quad Cities readers-choice result honestly

No confirmed results archive turned up for this guide, so there's no past-winner data to cite here, and inventing one would be worse than leaving the section short. What can be said honestly is how to talk about a nomination before the paper actually publishes a winners list: "nominated for Best of the Quad Cities" is accurate the moment a business appears on the ballot; "won Best of the Quad Cities" is only accurate once qctimes.com says so in print.

That distinction matters more in a bistate metro than a single-city one, since a claim that overstates a result travels across both the Iowa and Illinois sides of the readership fast. Keep marketing language tied to the confirmed ballot status, not an assumed outcome.

A vote-promotion push can help a business reach the customers it already has and point them at the correct qctimes.com/contests/best-of-the-quad-cities page rather than a stale search result. It cannot guarantee a category outcome once every other nominated business's real supporters show up too. Read how online contest votes work for those shared mechanics, then is buying votes legal before any budget goes toward a campaign built around this particular ballot.