Eastport Chamber Scarecrow Contest: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Eastport Chamber Scarecrow Contest is and who runs it

The Eastport Chamber Scarecrow Contest is a chamber-run public vote in which Eastport, Maine residents and visitors pick a favorite scarecrow built by local businesses and community groups. Eastport is a compact coastal city where the program works as genuine community theater: shops, school groups and families put up scarecrow builds around town, and the Eastport Chamber of Commerce invites the whole community to choose among them. The organizer posts the contest on its own website instead of an outside contest network and links supporters to a Google Forms ballot where the vote is cast.

The ballot itself shows what the program is. Entries on the 2025 form carried names and builders, among them Scare-Crow by Jerri's Cakery & Confections, Baker by Queen Bee Bakes, Vinny the Vet by Hamptons Watercraft & Marine and Quack-O-Lantern by the Tipsy D. Community builds filled out the field as well, including Reggie the Rooster-Crow by RSE PTO, Elphaba by Payton Jacobsen and an entry titled A Mother's Love. That mix of business and neighborhood builders is the point of the program: it is not a statewide ranking but a town choosing its favorite seasonal display, and the chamber uses it to pull residents and visitors through Eastport during the Halloween stretch.

Because the chamber runs the ballot from its own website, the contest post is the reference for anything the ballot itself leaves unstated.

When the Eastport scarecrow vote runs and what the chamber leaves unstated

The chamber's own dating is the backbone of the program. The 2025 cycle was promoted as the 5th Annual Scarecrow Contest, and entries opened on September 14, 2025, when the chamber's site announced that entries were open for that edition. Voting then ran from October 15 through October 26, 2025, closing on the day of the Trick or Treat on Main Street event, which the chamber scheduled for Sunday, October 26 from 12 to 2 pm and used to announce the winners at 12:45 pm.

The shape repeats each fall: builders submit scarecrows in a separate entry phase in mid-September, the public vote runs through late October, and winners are crowned during a downtown Halloween event. Confirmed edition years for the program sit in 2024 and 2025, which is what qualifies the contest as an annual event here, and the chamber's own labeling of the 2025 run as its 5th annual edition points to cycles before those. The next cycle is expected in 2026.

What the chamber does not publish is the fine print: the ballot carries no category breakdown, and no rule states whether one person may come back and vote again or who is eligible to take part; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How to vote for a scarecrow in Eastport

Voting in the Eastport contest is deliberately plain. The chamber's contest post points to the ballot, a Google Form whose required question reads "Please vote for your favorite scarecrow." A supporter opens the form, selects the named entry they want to back, and submits. That is the entire mechanic: a public vote with no tiered ballot to work through and no separate supporter registration described on the chamber's pages.

Builders have a different track from voters. The chamber opens an entry phase before voting begins so that scarecrow builds can be submitted and named, while supporters only ever cast votes on the finished ballot. Because the form is short, the practical experience is simple: scroll the list of named scarecrows, find the build you want to back, whether it is a business entry like Baker by Queen Bee Bakes or a community entry like Reggie the Rooster-Crow by RSE PTO, select it and submit.

The chamber's contest post is also where the closing stretch is anchored. The 2025 ballot tied its end to the Trick or Treat on Main Street event in Eastport, so a supporter who wants to be sure the vote is still open should read the chamber's post and the live form together before voting rather than assuming the window from memory.

Eastport's scarecrow ballot beside Maine's other community votes

Eastport's scarecrow vote is the most local program on Maine's page set. Its nearest neighbours in this market are statewide or citywide reader votes, and all of them differ from the Eastport ballot in scope. Best of the 207 and Best of Maine are broad reader surveys that span businesses across many categories. The Kennebec Journal Readers' Choice belongs to a daily newspaper's franchise. The Best Bluegrass Album Grammy Awards Predictions Poll, the Best Pizza Places In Ellsworth And MDI Poll and the Best Super Bowl Food Meatballs Or Pizza Poll each track a narrow question for a wider audience.

The scarecrow contest is narrower than all of them: a single chamber, a single town, and a seasonal subject that only exists in October. For a supporter that means the competition is among neighbors rather than among hundreds of nominees, and for an organizer it shows how a chamber-sized program can run a public vote without a media company behind it. The Google Forms ballot, the mid-September entry phase and the October winners event are all pieces a small chamber can operate on its own site, which is exactly what distinguishes Eastport's program from the larger Maine surveys it sits beside on this market's page set.

Getting more support for a scarecrow entry in Eastport

Support for a scarecrow entry in Eastport comes down to making the ballot easy to reach. The vote lives on a short Google Form, so an entry's builder can share the chamber's contest post directly, name the entry exactly as the ballot lists it, and ask customers to pick that build before voting closes. The chamber's own calendar helps: winners are crowned during the Trick or Treat on Main Street event on October 26, which gives supporters a concrete reason to vote early in the window rather than after it.

The chamber posts no guidance about outside voting help, so an entry that wants broader reach should lean on the tactics that work in any public vote: reminders, direct links and clear instructions naming the build to select. Our votes guide collects those methods in detail.