2026 Favorites Of the Four States: How Voting Works & How to Win

A Joplin-market ballot among Missouri's best-of programs

Missouri has no shortage of readers' choice ballots, and most of the ones you will find discussed online belong to big-metro publishers: the St. Louis titles, the metro dailies, Columbia papers, statewide food magazines. Favorites Of the Four States is the odd one out in that company, because its anchor is not a metro core at all. It belongs to The Joplin Globe, the newspaper of Joplin in the state's southwest corner, and it asks that paper's own readership to name the businesses and organizations they favor.

The 2026 cycle carried the full name 2026 Favorites Of the Four States and lived on Second Street, the balloting platform that hosts the Globe's other interactive promotions. Second Street labels the promotion type Ballot/NominationAndVotingBallot, which is worth knowing because it signals a combined nomination-and-voting flow rather than a plain vote-only form. The voting address for the live cycle was joplinglobe.secondstreetapp.com/2026-Favorites.

The vertical is best-of in the business sense: the ballot exists to let a local readership crown favorite merchants, services and institutions. That puts it in the same genre as the metro ballots, but the scale and the audience are the Globe's market, not the state's.

The dated record: five springs and counting

Five editions of this ballot sit on the confirmed list, one for each spring from 2022 through 2026, an established run on the Globe's promotion calendar rather than a flash in the pan. The earliest confirmed window opened on March 11, 2022, and every cycle since has followed the newspaper's annual rhythm.

The latest cycle, 2026, is also the most precisely dated. It opened on March 16, 2026 and closed on June 20, 2026, giving supporters roughly a spring-to-early-summer stretch to cast their votes. That window is now shut, so the live tally for 2026 is final as far as the ballot's own dates go.

What the Globe has not put in print is just as relevant to anyone tracking this program. The category lineup for the 2026 ballot was never published alongside the dates, and neither was any rule about repeat-voting frequency or supporter eligibility; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. A trade write-up that mentioned a winner did describe the program as the annual Reader's Choice Favorites of the Four States contest held by The Joplin Globe, which corroborates the cadence even where the fine print is absent.

For the 2027 edition, no opening or closing dates exist yet. The Globe's own announcements, and the year-stamped address that appears under its Second Street host each cycle, are the signals to watch.

How a supporter actually votes on this ballot

The mechanic is a public vote, open to anyone the ballot reaches, hosted on Second Street under the Globe's account. Practically, that means a supporter opens the year-stamped ballot address, moves through the categories the Globe has loaded, and submits a choice in each one they care about. No purchase, subscription or newspaper membership is described as a requirement anywhere in the program's footprint.

Because Second Street files the promotion under a combined nomination-and-voting type, the flow can include a step where a supporter puts a business forward before voting on it, which differs from a plain vote-only form where the field of candidates is fixed in advance. That combined structure is common for best-of ballots that accept write-ins or fresh nominations during the window itself.

Timing matters more than technique here. The 2026 form accepted submissions from March 16 through June 20, 2026, and a vote sent after the closing date simply does not count. A supporter who wants a favorite to place should plan to act inside the window, and a business that wants its customers to show up should say so while the ballot is live rather than after.

What the ballot does not advertise is any frequency rule. Whether the form allows repeat visits from the same supporter, and on what schedule, is something the live page governs in practice; the Globe has not stated it in print for this program.

How this ballot sits beside its Missouri neighbours

Within Missouri's best-of field, this program's nearest neighbours differ from it on every axis that matters: publisher, market and reach. The A-List St. Louis Magazine ballot answers to a St. Louis lifestyle magazine, while Best of KC serves its own metro readership. Both are metro-scale affairs with far larger potential audiences than a southwest Missouri newspaper's readership.

Columbia contributes two entries with different structures: the Columbia Missourian Reader's Choice Awards, run by the university-affiliated paper, and Columbia MO CommunityVotes, which follows the CommunityVotes partner model. A food-specific title, the Feast Magazine FEAST 50, narrows the genre further to dining.

Against that set, Favorites Of the Four States stands out for its anchor and its name. This ballot alone answers to the Joplin market, and its title references the multi-state region the Globe's readership straddles rather than a city or a state. Its host is also distinctive: Second Street carries the whole Globe promotion calendar, sweepstakes and photo contests included, whereas several siblings sit on CommunityVotes or the publishers' own forms. For outreach planning, the practical difference is audience: this ballot reaches Globe readers, the others do not.

Strengthening support inside this ballot's rules

Support in this program is earned during the window, and the 2026 window ran from mid-March to late June, so a campaign that starts after the closing date earns nothing. The most durable support comes from people with a real stake in the Joplin market: customers who already visit, staff, and local followers who see the ballot as a civic nod rather than a chore. A short ask with the ballot link, repeated through the spring, fits the format far better than a late surge.

On outside help, the Globe has not printed a policy for this ballot either way, which cuts both: nothing published permits purchased votes, and nothing published forbids them. The organizer's tally is still the only thing that decides placement. If you are weighing options, our award votes page explains the general mechanics, and the honest baseline is that organic reach you can mobilize yourself is the only input fully within your control.