Best of Ascension Community's Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Best of Ascension Community's Choice Awards is and who runs it

The Best of Ascension Community's Choice Awards celebrates the leading businesses and organizations of the Ascension area, the market centered on Gonzales, Louisiana. It is a business awards program in the best-of tradition: the community nominates local companies, and public voting decides the finalists and winners in each category. The program describes itself as completely driven by public participation, which makes the size and consistency of a nominee's supporter base the deciding factor rather than any judging panel.

The organizer is the local USA TODAY Network paper published by Gannett, and the page footer carries a USA TODAY NETWORK Ventures copyright line for 2026. The ballot is carried on Your Choice Awards, a dedicated awards site, at the Gonzales market address yourchoiceawards.com/gonzales/. That address is the live ballot for this program, not a general awards hub, so everything on it pertains to the Ascension market.

Scale is substantial for a local program: the ballot states that each year it recognizes over 360 businesses and organizations, all thanks to community involvement. Nominations, voting and the winners announcement are all run through the same Gonzales page, and the program also advertises business resources and a winners section alongside the ballot itself.

The dated record for the Ascension awards

Confirmed editions of the program run in 2025 and 2026, both hosted at the Gonzales address on the Your Choice Awards site. The 2026 cycle is fully scheduled on the ballot page, and its three phases give the clearest picture of how the program's year is shaped.

The nomination round ran July 10-31, 2026, and the program frames it as the start of everything: it all begins with nominations. Once nominations closed, the leading companies in every category advanced to the voting round, which runs October 1-15, 2026. After voting ends, the winners announcement follows on December 17, 2026. The ballot also advertises a nominator incentive for the 2026 cycle: people who enter nominations are entered to win a $250 prize.

On the rules side, the page publishes a daily vote rule. It states that a supporter may cast one vote per category per day while the voting round is open. What the page does not publish is the roster of individual categories, a count of those categories, or any eligibility terms for nominees and voters; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Because the 2025 edition is also confirmed, the 2026 schedule reads as a returning cycle rather than a debut, and the program's own claim that it recognizes over 360 businesses and organizations each year supports that annual shape.

How a supporter votes in the Ascension ballot today

Supporting a nominee in the Best of Ascension Community's Choice Awards is a two-phase activity, and the phase determines what a supporter can actually do.

In the nomination phase, which ran July 10-31, 2026, supporters submitted the businesses and organizations they wanted recognized in the Ascension area. Nominators were entered to win a $250 prize, an incentive the ballot attaches to the nomination step rather than to voting. When nominations closed, only the highest-ranked companies per category advanced, so a business that did not rank near the top of its category does not appear on the voting ballot.

In the voting phase, which runs October 1-15, 2026, the mechanic is a daily return. The ballot states that a supporter may cast one vote per category per day while the round is open. In practice that means a supporter opens the Gonzales page on the Your Choice Awards site, finds the category holding the nominee they back, casts a vote, and comes back the next day to do it again. Across a fifteen-day window, that daily habit is what moves a nominee up, and because the rule is per category, a supporter who cares about several local businesses can support each of them on the same visit.

After October 15, the ballot's work is done and attention shifts to the winners announcement on December 17, 2026.

Where this ballot sits among Louisiana's community choice programs

The Ascension ballot is part of a wider family of Louisiana best-of programs that this site covers, each anchored to its own market and its own publisher arrangement. The nearest siblings on the site are the Alexandria Community's Choice Awards and the Bayou's Best Community's Choice Awards in Houma, both community choice ballots in the same best-of vertical.

Larger markets have their own programs too: Best of Baton Rouge covers the capital region next door to Ascension, Best of SWLA serves southwest Louisiana, and the Best of New Orleans runs under the Gambit publication. The Best of 225, run with 225 magazine, covers the Baton Rouge region under a separate banner.

What distinguishes the Ascension ballot within this group is its publisher and its scale. It runs under the local Gannett and USA TODAY Network paper rather than an independent alternative weekly, and its ballot recognizes over 360 businesses and organizations, which is a broad spread for a single-parish market. Its cycle is also fully dated for 2026, with nominations in July, voting October 1-15 and winners on December 17, so supporters in Gonzales have a longer runway between rounds than in programs that run nomination and voting back to back.

Strengthening support for a nominee in the Ascension ballot

Because this ballot permits a single vote in each category per day across the October 1-15, 2026 round, the practical way to strengthen a nominee is to build a daily habit among supporters. A restaurant, shop or service business in the Ascension area that asks every customer to vote on the day they visit, and to come back the next day, converts foot traffic into repeated ballots without any special tooling. Posting the category name and the Gonzales ballot address at the register and in email receipts does most of the work.

The nomination phase matters as much as the vote: only the highest-ranked companies per category advance from the July window to the October ballot, so a business that misses the nomination cut has nothing to campaign for. Marking the nomination round on the calendar each year is part of any serious push.

On outside help, the Gonzales ballot page prints no rule text about purchased or automated votes, so the organizer's position on that question is not published there. The general picture, including what organizers typically permit and where the legal lines sit, is covered in the votes guide and the legality page. Paid voting is never a requirement to appear on this ballot; the program is free to enter and free to vote in.