Best of St Joe 2025: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes in Best of St Joe and why it matters locally

Best of St Joe 2025 is the readers' poll through which St. Joseph residents name their favorite local businesses, and it is run by KQTV, the channel 2 television station that serves St. Joseph, Missouri from its home at kq2.com. For a local business, a strong showing in this ballot is word of mouth made visible: the people filling it in are the station's own viewers and the city's own shoppers, not a national audience.

The ballot itself lives on Second Street, the balloting platform KQTV uses for its interactive promotions, at kq2.secondstreetapp.com/Best-of-St-Joe-2025. That address is the program's own page on the station's Second Street host, and it is where both nominations and votes were cast in the 2025 round.

The facts below are the ones confirmed for this program.

Because the organizer is a broadcaster rather than a chamber or a magazine, the poll sits alongside the station's other on-air and online features, and the results feed directly into how the station presents local businesses to its audience.

The dated facts: nine editions and the 2025 window

Confirmed editions of Best of St Joe run from 2017 through 2025. Each of those years has its own Second Street ballot under the station's kq2 host, which makes this one of the steadier annual readers' polls in Missouri: nine consecutive editions with no gap in the sequence.

The 2025 edition ran as a combined nomination-and-voting ballot from February 14 to April 21, 2025, and it is now closed. That window is the one dated fact for the current cycle: nominations and votes both happened inside the same two-month spring stretch, which is a pattern worth noting for any business planning its own push, since the whole campaign has to be ready before the ballot opens rather than assembled during it.

What KQTV has not published in the material available for this program is the category roster for the ballot, along with any per-supporter vote cap or eligibility rule; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. That gap matters less than it might, because the ballot itself prints everything a supporter needs on the day it opens.

For the next cycle, the station's pattern points to a 2026 edition on the same Second Street host, most likely under a matching Best-of-St-Joe-2026 address. Nothing in the confirmed material gives a start date for that round, so the 2025 window is the best guide available: expect a late-winter opening and a spring close.

How a supporter votes on the KQTV ballot

Voting in Best of St Joe is a plain public vote on a Second Street ballot, and the 2025 format was a nomination-and-voting ballot, which means one page handles both stages. A supporter arrives at the KQTV ballot, picks a category, and either writes in or selects the St. Joseph business they want to recognize. Where a category is still collecting nominations, the write-in itself puts a name forward; where voting is open, the choice is made from the names already on the ballot.

The practical sequence is short. Open kq2.secondstreetapp.com/Best-of-St-Joe-2025 while a round is live. Move through the categories you have opinions about. Enter or choose your favorite in each. Submit. If the ballot allows return visits, come back the next day and repeat for the categories you care most about, following whatever the page says about frequency.

Two things a supporter should not guess at. First, the frequency rule: whether KQTV permits one vote per person per day or a single vote per round is not stated in the material available for this program, and the ballot's own instructions are the authority. Second, eligibility: the live page states who may take part. Both of those print on the ballot itself, so a supporter who reads the top of the page before voting needs nothing else.

Where this ballot sits among Missouri's readers' polls

Missouri has no shortage of best-of ballots, and Best of St Joe is the one that belongs to St. Joseph specifically. Its closest neighbours in the state answer to different publishers and different cities: the A-List St. Louis Magazine poll serves St. Louis, Best of KC is a magazine-run ballot elsewhere in the state, and the Best of Southwest Missouri ballot covers the state's southwest region.

Two more are worth knowing for comparison. The Columbia Missourian Reader's Choice Awards come from the Columbia newspaper, and Columbia MO CommunityVotes runs the CommunityVotes format in Columbia, while Feast Magazine FEAST 50 is the dining-focused St. Louis list. None of these share a ballot with Best of St Joe, and a business nominated in one gains nothing automatically in another.

What distinguishes the KQTV poll is its publisher: a television station rather than a magazine or a national network, which ties the ballot to local broadcast coverage of St. Joseph and gives winners a kind of visibility that a print-only list does not. Its nine-year unbroken run from 2017 to 2025 also means the audience knows to look for it each spring.

Strengthening support in the KQTV poll

Support in Best of St Joe comes from the same place the ballot does: St. Joseph. A business that wants more votes in the next KQTV round should start with the people who already walk through the door. Tell them the ballot is open, give them the exact Second Street address, and name the category you are hoping to win so nobody has to hunt for it. A sign at the counter, a line on receipts and a short email to your customer list all work, and a reminder partway through the window beats a single announcement on opening day.

On outside help, the honest framing is the organizer's: KQTV runs this as a public poll of its viewers and the city's residents, and the station controls what counts. Any push that depends on votes from outside the St. Joseph audience, or on volume that looks nothing like the ballot's normal traffic, is a judgment call the station gets to make, and its remedy is its own to apply. The safe plan is the one built on real supporters, repeated reminders and an easy link, which is also what our votes guide recommends for local best-of ballots generally.