Fans Choice 2025: How Voting Works & How to Win

What Fans Choice 2025 is and who runs it

Fans Choice 2025 is a best-of style public-vote program run by KQTV, the television station serving St. Joseph, Missouri. The station is known on air as KQ2, and its web presence at kq2.com carries the same branding as the ballot. Unlike the magazine readers' polls that dominate Missouri's best-of scene, this program belongs to a single local broadcaster, and it exists to let viewers and local-business customers crown favorites in their own market.

Second Street, the platform behind a large share of American readers' choice and best-of contests, hosts the KQTV ballot. KQTV's Second Street account sits at kq2.secondstreetapp.com, and the Fans Choice 2025 ballot lives at that address under its own name. The promotion is registered as a Ballot/NominationAndVotingBallot, which means the format combines a nomination phase with a voting phase rather than running a plain vote on a fixed list.

The station's account also carries other promotions, which helps show what kind of organizer this is. Alongside Fans Choice, KQTV has run sweepstakes such as Out of the Ballpark and quarterly cash giveaways, plus a photo gallery promotion called Senior Greetings sponsored by Highland Community College. Fans Choice is the only ballot-style program among them, which makes it the station's dedicated public-vote franchise.

Facts at a glance

The dated history: 2024, 2025 and what comes next

Two editions of Fans Choice are confirmed, one in 2024 and one in 2025, both hosted on KQTV's Second Street account. The 2024 edition sat at the Fans-Choice-2024 address, and the 2025 edition at Fans-Choice-2025, so each cycle gets its own ballot page under the year in its name. That two-year history is the whole published story of the program so far.

The 2025 window is the most precisely dated fact about this ballot. It opened on August 29, 2025 and closed on November 14, 2025, a run of roughly two and a half months that stretches from late summer into mid-autumn. The ballot is now closed for that cycle. The 2024 edition's dates are less precisely dated, with platform evidence pointing to a late-August start in that year as well, which fits a station that slots its ballot into the same late-summer slot each fall.

On that history, Fans Choice reads as an annual program, and a 2026 edition is the reasonable expectation. Nothing has been posted for 2026 yet, so the next window's dates are not published. When KQTV opens the next cycle, the pattern says to look for a new Fans-Choice address on kq2.secondstreetapp.com in late August, with voting running into November. Until the station posts it, the 2025 dates remain the most recent confirmed window, and anyone planning a support campaign should anchor their calendar to the live page rather than to last year's dates.

How a supporter votes on the Fans Choice ballot

The literal mechanic on Second Street is a nomination-and-voting ballot. A supporter opens the Fans Choice page at kq2.secondstreetapp.com, and the page shows whichever phase KQTV has switched on. In a nomination-and-voting format, the first phase usually asks visitors to nominate a local favorite in each category, and the voting phase then lets supporters choose among the nominated entries. The exact sequencing for any given cycle is set by the station when it builds the ballot.

Second Street ballots share a common interaction pattern. You scroll to a category, select the nominee you want, and submit. Before the vote is accepted, the page may ask for an email address or a quick registration, a step Second Street uses to keep repeat voting in check. Whether Fans Choice requires that step, and whether a supporter can return on another day to vote again, is controlled by the settings KQTV chooses for each edition, and those settings are not published ahead of time.

The practical advice for a supporter is simple. Open the ballot during the window, read the phase and the prompts it shows, complete whatever verification step appears, and submit your choices before the closing date. For 2025 that date was November 14. Because the category roster is not published in advance, plan to spend a few minutes reading the ballot rather than arriving with a fixed list, and let the live page, not memory, tell you what is on it this cycle.

How Fans Choice sits beside Missouri's other best-of ballots

Missouri has a busy best-of scene, and Fans Choice occupies a distinct corner of it. The state's largest programs are metro magazine polls: the A-List St. Louis Magazine in the east, Best of KC, and the Feast Magazine FEAST 50 focused on St. Louis dining. Mid-Missouri adds the Columbia Missourian Reader's Choice Awards and Columbia MO CommunityVotes, while the Best of Southwest Missouri ballot covers the Springfield side of the state.

Fans Choice differs from all of them on three axes. First, the organizer is a television station rather than a magazine or a community-votes partner, which means promotion happens on broadcast as well as online. Second, the market is St. Joseph, a northwest Missouri city that none of the metro programs above center on, so the ballot gives that market its own dedicated contest instead of folding it into a bigger neighbor's. Third, the format is a nomination-and-voting ballot, where several of the magazine polls run a straight vote on a pre-set category list.

For a local business, that combination matters. A St. Joseph favorite competes against its own immediate peers here, not against a statewide or metro-wide field, and the nomination phase means a business with loyal customers can put itself on the ballot through its own supporters. The trade-off is a smaller supporter pool than a metro poll draws, which makes every individual vote worth more and makes the closing date, November 14 in the 2025 cycle, the moment that decides the outcome.

Strengthening support in the Fans Choice ballot

Support in a nomination-and-voting ballot has two jobs: get nominated, then get voted. For a St. Joseph business, the first job is customer outreach during the nomination phase, asking regulars to put your name forward on the Second Street page. The second job is a reminder push once voting opens, because the 2025 window ran from August 29 to November 14 and support cast early can fade before the closing date.

KQTV has not published a rule about outside help or purchased support in the material this page is built from, so the ballot's own terms are the authority; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. What is always true is that the organizer controls the ballot and can apply its settings to any pattern it dislikes. The safest campaign is one built on real customers voting honestly within the limits the live page shows. For tactics that fit that approach, see our guide to getting more votes, and for the wider question of paid support read our award-votes overview.