Lansing City Pulse Top of the Town: How Voting Works & How to Win

What is the Lansing City Pulse Top of the Town contest and who runs it?

Top of the Town is the readers-choice contest staged by Lansing City Pulse, the Lansing, Michigan, newspaper behind lansingcitypulse.com. The masthead pairs the contest name with Best of Greater Lansing, and the ballot sits on the paper's own site rather than on an outside polling service. Its ballot address is the Best of Lansing Festival page, https://lansingcitypulse.com/best-of-lansing-festival/.

That same address carries the Best of Lansing Festival, a free community gathering introduced on the page as "Back for a third year, the free Best of Lansing Festival, co-hosted by Lansing 5:01 and Downtown Lansing Inc." The festival brings the capital region's artists, creatives and retail favorites together around 517 Day, and the contest ballot is served directly from that page.

For the 2025 run the paper added a broadcast partner, WKAR Public Media. The station's newsroom carried the launch notice and points residents toward the ballot, which widens the contest's reach well past the paper's own subscriber base. That pairing of an alt-weekly publisher with a public-media broadcaster is unusual among Michigan reader polls and shapes how the campaign season unfolds.

When does the Top of the Town ballot open and close each cycle?

The cycles confirmed for this program fall in 2025 and 2026, and the contest runs annually. The 2025 launch set the pattern: submissions opened on October 1 and stayed open through October 14, with WKAR's notice stating, "Submissions are now open and run through October 14." Nominating and voting share that stretch, so a resident's pick made inside it counts in both directions at once.

The wider voting phase stays inside October, closing on October 31, 2025. A 2026 cycle is confirmed as well, but its own dates are not yet announced anywhere on the festival page.

The launch notice invites residents to nominate and vote for favorites across a wide sweep of greater Lansing life, yet it prints neither the complete field roster nor any per-person voting limit or eligibility test; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How does a supporter cast a vote in the Top of the Town contest?

Casting a ballot starts at the paper's homepage. The organizer's own instruction reads, "visit lansingcitypulse.com, then click on the Top of the Town banners at the top of the page to get to the contest site." Those banners are the only doorway the publisher advertises; no separate app and no third-party polling host sits between the supporter and lansingcitypulse.com.

Once on the contest site, a supporter moves through the category fields and marks a favorite in each field that matters, with nominations and votes gathered side by side. Nothing in the ballot instructions states whether an account or email sign-in is required on the Top of the Town contest site, so a first-time visitor should expect the simplest path: arrive, click the banner, choose, submit before the posted close.

Because the whole ballot lives under the paper's own domain, every step from arrival to submission happens on lansingcitypulse.com pages, and the same route works for someone nominating a business and someone backing an already-listed favorite.

How does Top of the Town sit beside Michigan's other reader-choice ballots?

Michigan's reader-choice family is crowded, and this program holds a distinct seat in it. Six sibling ballots serve the state's other markets: Best of Northern Michigan up north, Grand Rapids Magazine Best of GR on the west side, and a cluster of Detroit titles, the Detroit Community Choice Awards, the Detroit News Readers' Choice, the DN Readers Choice Awards and the Detroit Music Awards.

Three things set Top of the Town apart. Its base is the capital region rather than a metro giant. Its operator is an alt-weekly paper working with a public-media broadcaster, a pairing none of the Detroit or Grand Rapids ballots advertise. And it ties its vote to a street-level event, the Best of Lansing Festival around 517 Day, so the campaign season carries a physical gathering along with the online ballot.

How can a nominee build support in the Top of the Town race?

Support in this race compounds during a compressed stretch, because nominating and voting happen together between October 1 and October 14. A favorite pushed early collects both a nomination and a ballot mark in the same pass, which makes outreach to regular customers and loyal readers worth more in the opening week than a late surge.

The WKAR partnership widens the audience beyond the paper's own base, so a nominee is competing for attention from strangers as well as regulars. The publisher posts no stated policy on organized outside help with the ballot, so a campaign that leans on any third party should read the terms posted with the live window before spending.

For outreach tactics that fit a newspaper-run public vote, the how to get more votes online guide covers the organic playbook.