Maine Boys XC Performer of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes, and why the ballot exists

Every week of the fall season, the publisher Maine Boys XC opens a Crowdsignal poll on its poll.fm service that lets the state's cross country community decide which boys performance deserves the weekly honor. The audience is the sport itself: runners, families, teammates and fans following Maine's season. Each ballot nominates a short list of performances from recent meets, and the community's pick takes the title.

The vote matters because it is the community's own signal, not a judging panel's. A runner who tops the ballot has out-polled peers across class lines, since the weekly list mixes nominations from different class-level state meets on a single question. On the sampled late-October 2025 ballot, the leading answer finished with 60% of the vote, 139 raw votes, while the next answer held 22%, or 51 votes. Those margins are visible to everyone on the closed poll page.

Taking part costs nothing and carries no registration step on the ballot itself. Anyone with the link can join in, which is what makes the result feel like a genuine read of community sentiment rather than a curated award. For supporters, the practical implication is that reach drives the outcome: the nominee whose circle of teammates, parents and schoolmates shares the link most effectively in the days before the Friday afternoon close usually wins the week.

Because the ballot involves high school athletes, this page deliberately does not name nominees. The live poll carries the roster for the current week.

The dated record: seasons, the sampled week, and the close time

Two seasons of this program are confirmed: 2024 and 2025. The series is weekly in shape, built from repeated fall ballots rather than a single annual event, and the 2025 season was still producing new polls late in October. The sampled ballot ran Oct 27 through Nov 2 under the title Maine Boys XC Performer of the Week, and its page now carries a Poll Closed marker, which is how every finished week in the series appears once voting ends.

The only precise clock the organizer publishes is the weekly close: the poll closes Friday at 2 p.m. ET in a live week. That gives supporters a fixed weekly deadline regardless of which dates the ballot itself carries. No season calendar, no list of week numbers and no first-ballot date for an upcoming fall is posted on the ballot page, so supporters who want to plan around the series need to follow the publisher's weekly announcements.

For the next season, the expected rhythm is the same late-October window the 2024 and 2025 ballots occupied, but the organizer has not printed a schedule for it. Which weeks run, when the first ballot of a new fall opens, and whether the series continues past the seasons already confirmed should all be read off the live ballot and the publisher's postings each fall rather than assumed from this page.

How a supporter votes on the live ballot

The mechanic is a single-question Crowdsignal poll. A supporter opens the current poll.fm address, sees the week's question and a radio-button list of nominated performances, selects a single answer, and presses the Vote button. Crowdsignal then shows a results view with the percentage and raw count beside each answer at that moment. There is no login, no fee and no form to fill in beyond the selection itself.

The timing rule matters as much as the mechanic. A ballot is only votable between its weekly opening and the Friday 2 p.m. ET close the organizer states. After the close, the same address switches to a Poll Closed view, and the radio buttons are gone. Anyone arriving at an old link mid-season is therefore looking at a finished week, and the current link must be picked up from the publisher's newest posting.

The ballot carries no write-in option, so a supporter cannot add a runner the publisher did not nominate. The roster each week is entirely the organizer's choice. That keeps the ballot simple but means a fan campaign has to work within the printed answers: share the link, remind people before the Friday afternoon close, and repeat the effort the following week if the runner is nominated again.

Voting from a phone works the same as from a desktop, since Crowdsignal renders the same question and Vote button on small screens. Nothing about the process changes week to week beyond the roster and the dates in the title.

How this ballot sits beside other Maine public votes

Maine has a busy public-vote scene, but nearly all of it covers businesses and services on annual cycles. The state's reader choice programs, including Best of the 207, Kennebec Journal Readers' Choice and Mainebiz Readers' Choice, each ask the public to pick favorites across dozens of business categories over a multi-week window once a year. This ballot shares the public-vote mechanic with them and little else.

The differences are the publisher, the subject and the rhythm. Maine Boys XC is a running-specific publisher, the subject is individual athletic performance rather than a business, and the cycle is weekly across a fall season rather than annual. Other statewide votes such as Best of Maine, the Maine Parade of Homes People's Choice and the Maine Restaurant Week Diners' Choice follow the familiar annual shape tied to an event or a publication cycle.

For a supporter, that rhythm changes the strategy. A business campaign in an annual reader vote can build toward a deadline known months ahead; a weekly high school poll must be won inside a few days, every time the runner is nominated. The vote counts are also far smaller, as the sampled week's 60%-to-139-votes lead shows, so a modest but well-timed sharing push can genuinely decide a week. Anyone researching Maine votes more broadly can compare every program's shape and window on its own page before deciding where effort is best spent.