Arts Readers Choice: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Arts Readers Choice ballot is and who runs it

The Arts Readers Choice is the arts strand of Readers' Choice, the best-of feature run by the Louisville Eccentric Observer, the alt-weekly newspaper published in Louisville, Kentucky and known to its readers as LEO Weekly. The paper describes the feature in its own words: "Every year, LEO asks readers to share their picks for the city's top spots in food, drinks, nightlife, arts, entertainment, fitness and more." The arts ballot is one slice of that citywide ask, aimed at readers who follow the paper's arts and culture coverage.

LEO Weekly runs the ballot from leoweekly.com, its own domain, without handing the vote to an outside contest service. The confirmed voting address is leoweekly.com/arts/readers-choice-2012-15758196/, a page under the arts section of the paper's site. Since the publisher prints the ballot directly, everything a supporter needs, from the sign-in prompt to the daily vote rule, comes from the newspaper itself.

The ballot page shows best-of phrases across the paper's coverage, including an art fair and an art gallery among them, alongside categories covering food, drink, nightlife and entertainment. Those phrases are candidates drawn from the page's own headings, not a printed roster of the full arts lineup, so treat them as examples of the ballot's shape rather than a complete list.

The dated record: editions, the August window and what LEO has not printed

Two editions of the programme are confirmed: 2012 and 2025. The 2012 ballot is the page still live at the confirmed voting address, titled Readers' Choice 2012, and the paper's Readers' Choice section carried fresh activity in 2025. LEO's own description of the feature as an annual ask to its readers is the paper's statement about cadence, and the two confirmed years are the editions this reference can point to.

The clearest dated span on the ballot is an August 12-25 issue window, shown on the page alongside the sign-in or register prompt. That two-week span is the window a supporter should plan around: it is long enough for a daily-vote rhythm to matter, and short enough that a supporter who discovers the ballot late in the span has limited days left to use.

The round schedule for the current cycle is absent from the ballot page, so the next edition's opening and closing days go unpublished ahead of time; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Any nomination round before voting is likewise absent from the page's description.

One quotable fact for this section: the confirmed editions of the Arts Readers Choice sit in 2012 and 2025, and the ballot page carries an August 12-25 issue window.

How a supporter votes on the LEO Weekly arts ballot today

Voting on the LEO Weekly arts ballot is a plain public vote with an email gate. The ballot page asks every supporter to sign in or register before voting, and the rule LEO prints on the page is explicit: "You may vote once per day, per email address." Those two facts together define the whole voting experience: an email address is the unit of participation, and each address gets one vote per day while the ballot is open.

In practice a supporter opens the Readers' Choice ballot on leoweekly.com, signs in or registers with an email address, finds the arts category they care about, and casts a vote for their pick. If they want to do more, the printed rule tells them exactly what is allowed: come back tomorrow and vote again from the same address. A household with several email addresses can multiply that daily rhythm, which is the honest way the ballot's design rewards organized support.

Because LEO Weekly publishes this ballot itself, the supporter deals with the newspaper alone from start to finish. The sign-in prompt, the daily rule and the category list all come from the paper's own pages, and the August 12-25 window on the ballot is the span the paper shows for the issue it belongs to. Nothing about the flow requires a purchase, and nothing on the page describes one.

One quotable fact for this section: LEO Weekly's ballot page prints the rule "You may vote once per day, per email address."

How this ballot sits beside Kentucky's other best-of programmes

Louisville's arts ballot is one of several best-of programmes across Kentucky, and each is run by a separate publisher. Within this market the nearest neighbour is the BroadwayWorld Louisville Awards, which covers Louisville theatre from a national publisher rather than from the city's alt-weekly. The Arts Readers Choice differs in that its host is the local paper itself, so its categories sit inside a citywide Readers' Choice feature rather than in a theatre-only ballot.

Elsewhere in the state, Best of Lexington KY and the Chevy Chaser Best of Lex serve Lexington, while the Best of Bowling Green serves the state's western side. The Best in Kentucky ballot and the Best Places to Work in Kentucky programme both cover the state as a whole. None of them shares LEO Weekly's arts focus or its Louisville readership.

What makes the arts ballot distinct is the combination of a general-interest Readers' Choice umbrella with an arts-specific slice, run by the publication whose arts coverage the nominees presumably appear in. A supporter deciding where to spend daily votes in Kentucky is choosing between different publishers, different markets and different category sets, not between editions of the same feature.

One quotable fact for this section: the BroadwayWorld Louisville Awards, Best of Lexington KY and Best in Kentucky are sibling programmes, each run separately from LEO Weekly's Readers' Choice.

Strengthening support inside the ballot's own rules

The ballot's design rewards daily habit over a single push. Because LEO Weekly allows one vote per day, per email address, a supporter base that returns every day across the August 12-25 window multiplies its impact without breaking any printed rule. The practical move for a nominee is to tell supporters exactly that: vote today, and vote again tomorrow, until the window closes.

What the organizer says about outside help is limited to the daily rule itself. LEO has not published a statement about voting software or bulk votes beyond the per-day, per-email limit, so the safe reading is the printed one: votes beyond one per address per day sit outside the rules the paper has stated. A push that depends on many people each voting daily fits the ballot; a push that depends on one person voting many times does not.

Timing matters too. A two-week window means early momentum compounds: a nominee who rallies supporters in the first days collects more total daily votes than one who starts late. For a fuller picture of outreach that fits a daily-limit ballot, see our votes guide, and for what purchased votes can and cannot promise, read the award-votes page before committing.