People's Choice 2025: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes in People's Choice and why the ballot exists

People's Choice 2025 is a readers' ballot, and the community it asks is the readership of the Greenwood Commonwealth, a Mississippi newspaper. The paper runs the program as a best-of contest in the business vertical: local readers put forward and then back the businesses and services they rate highest, and the paper publishes the results as a reader-driven honour for the winning establishments.

Second Street, an engagement platform many newspapers use for contests and promotions, carries the ballot. The 2025 edition sits at greenwoodcommonwealth.secondstreetapp.com/Peoples-Choice-2025, an address on the paper's Second Street domain. The platform classifies the promotion as a Ballot of the NominationAndVotingBallot type, meaning nomination and voting happen in a single flow rather than as two separate seasonal phases.

For a local business, the value of the ballot is the audience behind it. A vote here is a customer telling the paper, in public, which shop, restaurant or service they trust. That is why the contest draws genuine campaigning from nominees: the result is a published ranking that carries the newspaper's name. Businesses weighing a push in an open cycle can compare options at buy award votes.

Which editions are confirmed and when the window falls

Three editions of the ballot are confirmed: 2023, 2024 and 2025. Each sits under its own year-labelled address on the newspaper's Second Street domain, so the 2024 and 2023 ballots remain reachable at matching URLs. The program is therefore an annual fixture of the paper's promotions calendar rather than a single experiment.

The 2025 window is the dated core of this page. Voting opened on June 14, 2025 and closed on August 30, 2025, a summer run of roughly two and a half months. The platform lists the promotion's status as closed, so the 2025 ballot no longer accepts votes.

A later cycle also appears in the paper's promotion lineup: the 2026 People's Choice Presented by Bank of Commerce, which ran from June 13 through August 29, 2026 and is likewise closed. That edition carries a sponsor name, a detail the 2025 edition's listing does not show, and it confirms the mid-June to late-August shape repeating across cycles.

Unpublished, meanwhile, is the fine print. The ballot page prints neither its category roster nor any per-supporter limit, and eligibility text appears nowhere on the listing; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Until a new cycle opens under its own address, even its exact dates stay unprinted.

How a supporter votes on the ballot today

Voting runs through a combined nomination-and-voting form on Second Street. A supporter opens the cycle's address, and the ballot presents its categories in turn. Within each category the supporter either selects a listed nominee or, where the form offers it, writes a business name into the write-in field. The ballot then asks for whatever registration step the newspaper has configured before the vote counts.

Because the promotion type combines nomination and voting, a first-time participant does not wait for a nominees list to be published before casting a choice; the same form handles both acts. That shape matters for campaigners too: a business can be written in from the start of the window rather than relying on making a published shortlist.

The practical sequence for the 2025-style ballot runs: open the year-labelled page, work through the categories, choose or write in a nominee per category, complete registration, and submit. The platform confirms each vote as the form goes through. How frequently a single supporter may repeat the process is not printed by the newspaper, so the live form's own behaviour during an open window is the working answer.

While a cycle is closed, as the 2025 ballot is since August 30, 2025, the page remains a finished edition rather than a working form. Supporters wait for the next address to go live.

How this ballot sits beside its Mississippi neighbours

Mississippi runs several readers' ballots, and People's Choice is the Greenwood Commonwealth's entry in that set. Elsewhere in the state, the field includes Best of Coastal Mississippi, Best of the Best Jackson from the Clarion Ledger, Best of Mississippi, Best of Oxford from the Oxford Eagle, the Daily Journal Readers Choice in Tupelo, and the WCBI Viewers' Choice Awards.

What separates the Greenwood Commonwealth's ballot from those neighbours is its publisher profile and its window. It belongs to a single newspaper rather than a television station or a statewide title, and its confirmed cycles run mid-June through late August, a summer slot many other Mississippi ballots do not occupy. Its promotion type, a combined nomination-and-voting ballot, also differs from contests that split nomination and voting into separate phases.

The newspaper's broader Second Street lineup gives context too. Alongside the ballot, the same domain hosts sweepstakes promotions and a Mother of the Year survey, so People's Choice is part of a wider engagement calendar rather than the paper's only promotion. A business deciding where to campaign in Mississippi can therefore treat this ballot as the local, newspaper-anchored option, and read the sibling pages above for the statewide and regional alternatives.

Strengthening support in this ballot without breaking it

Campaigning for a People's Choice nomination works with the ballot's own grain. The combined nomination-and-voting form means a business's supporters can act from day one of the window, so the useful move is to tell customers the ballot is open early, name the exact categories worth entering, and give them the cycle's address directly. Because the newspaper prints no per-supporter rule, supporters should do what the live form permits at the time rather than assuming a frequency.

By promoting the ballot through its polls section, the newspaper signals that campaigning is expected: a readers' ballot exists to be campaigned in. What the paper has left unstated is any policy text on purchased votes for this program, so a business weighing that route should read the general picture first and treat the ballot's terms as controlling. The tactics that fit reader ballots of this kind, from customer asks to timing, are laid out in our votes guide.