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

Three confirmed years, one Gannett-run ballot

The Salina Journal built the Salina Community's Choice Awards on Second Street, the contest platform Gannett runs across its newspaper markets, at salina.gannettcontests.com. Three editions are confirmed there: 2024, 2025, and the 2026 round that has already closed.

Every one of those three years produced the same shape: a nomination page, a voting page, and a winners page, each carrying its own year in the address. That repetition across three separate cycles is itself evidence of how the Salina Journal structures this ballot every time, and it gives a business a reasonably reliable pattern to plan around even before the next cycle's own dates are published.

The one voting window a supporter can pin down exactly

The 2026 ballot opened July 17, 2026 and closed August 1, 2026, a little over two weeks of voting. That window has already run its course, and Second Street's own listing marks it closed.

Whether the 2027 cycle opens on a similar summer schedule is a separate question the Salina Journal has not yet answered in writing; confirm on the live ballot each cycle instead of penciling in the same weeks a year out.

The nomination phase that fed into the 2026 ballot, and the winners page that followed it, both carry the "2026" label in their own addresses, matching the same naming Second Street used for 2024 and 2025 before it. A supporter who bookmarks the wrong one of the three pages will land on a phase that has already closed rather than the one still open.

One ballot among 275 promotions running on the same host

salina.gannettcontests.com is not a page built for this ballot alone. The Salina Journal runs 275 promotions through that same address altogether, everything from prepaid gift cards to European river cruise sweepstakes sitting alongside this business ballot.

That scale sets Salina's ballot apart from Kansas's other readers'-choice programs. Best of Wichita and Best of Lawrence run under entirely separate publishers, while CommunityVotes Topeka and CommunityVotes Overland Park sit on the CommunityVotes network instead of Second Street. Best of Johnson County and Best of KC (Kansas City Magazine) round out the state's other major ballots, none of them tied to Salina's own result.

A business searching for its own nomination page on a host running 275 separate promotions has real reason to double-check the exact address before sharing it with customers. A link copied from an old bookmark or a forwarded message is just as likely to point at last year's closed ballot, or at an entirely different sweepstakes, as it is to land on the page that is actually open right now.

Building support for a business three editions into its own run

Three confirmed years puts the Salina Community's Choice Awards well past a brand-new ballot's first uncertain run, but it is still early enough that a business cannot point back to a decade of past winners to make its case. A newer program also means fewer Salina residents have voted in it before, so explaining what the ballot even is, and why it matters to a local business, carries as much weight as the ask itself. Direct outreach to people who already frequent the business, in person or through channels the business already owns, does more here than a single broadcast post aimed at strangers ever could.

Point the ballot link at the regulars first, then follow up with them again as the window narrows rather than relying on one message sent once and forgotten. Padding a ballot with activity that is not genuinely from Salina shoppers risks the entry outright, and a business chasing this specific nomination, on a host running hundreds of unrelated promotions, has more riding on getting the exact address right than it might assume. Is buying votes legal lays out the boundary a campaign like this has to respect before any outside help gets involved, and award-vote campaign planning works through what that outside help typically covers for a nominate-then-vote ballot shaped the way Salina's own is.