For The Sedalia Person Of The Year Poll: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Sedalia Person of the Year poll is and who runs it

The Sedalia Person of the Year poll is a public-vote award produced by KXKX, a radio station serving the Sedalia, Missouri area, and hosted on the station's own website at kxkx.com. It is not a third-party contest platform product. The ballot appears on the station's site as a news and survey feature, filed alongside the station's Missouri News, Sedalia News and newsletter categories, which tells you the poll is treated as local editorial content rather than a sponsored promotion.

The format has a clear inspiration. KXKX states on the ballot page that the award is based on TIME Magazine's Person of the Year issue, and the local version follows the same logic: it should go to the person or group that has had the most influence on the Sedalia area in the year, for better or for worse. That "for better or for worse" clause matters, because it means the ballot is not simply a popularity contest for well-liked figures. A controversial figure who dominated local headlines is as eligible under the stated criterion as a beloved volunteer.

The process the station describes has two stages. First, the station takes nominations from its audience. Second, it publishes the finalists and opens a final vote. The confirmed page is titled as the final vote for the 2013 award, which shows the poll is the closing round of a nomination-then-vote sequence rather than a single open entry form.

The dated record: which editions are confirmed and when the vote falls

The confirmed edition years for the Sedalia Person of the Year poll are 2013, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2023, 2025 and 2026. The 2013 ballot is the edition with the fullest published detail: the article went up in December 2013, and the confirmed voting window for that edition fell in December, opening and closing within that month. The station titled that page as the final vote for the 2013 award, so December is when the closing round landed in the edition we can date precisely.

The later years carry less printed detail. Editions in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2023, 2025 and 2026 are confirmed, and the most recent confirmed edition is 2026, which makes 2027 the year a next cycle would be expected. What the station has not published is a formal calendar: beyond the month-level December window of 2013, no edition's opening day or closing day has been stated, and the station has not printed a schedule promising the ballot in every intervening year. The current cycle's exact dates: confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Two other gaps sit in the same place. The station has not published a per-supporter vote limit, an eligibility rule or any round dates from a promotions calendar for this market, because no promotion for this market exists on any contest platform; the poll lives only on kxkx.com. If you need the exact closing moment of the current vote, the poll page itself and the station's on-air mentions are the places that will carry it.

How a supporter votes in the Sedalia Person of the Year poll today

The mechanic is deliberately simple, because the ballot sits on a radio station's own article page rather than on a contest platform with accounts and entry forms. A supporter who wants to vote opens kxkx.com, finds the current Sedalia Person of the Year poll page, and reads the finalist list the station has published from audience nominations. The station's own description of the 2013 edition makes the sequence explicit: "We took your nominations, and here are the finalists." The final vote then asks the reader to choose among those finalists.

Choosing means selecting the finalist the supporter believes had the most influence on the Sedalia area in that calendar year, for better or for worse. The vote is cast in the poll embedded on the article page. No registration step, no email confirmation and no platform sign-in are described on the confirmed page, which keeps the barrier to participation low and suits a radio audience that may be hearing about the ballot on air and voting immediately on a phone.

What the page does not settle is repetition. The confirmed page prints no rule on how often a single person may cast a vote, whether votes are limited per day, or whether any eligibility restriction applies to who may take part. Those rules, if the station enforces any, are not written on the ballot page. A supporter who plans to campaign for a finalist should read the live poll page first and follow whatever the station prints there for the current cycle, since the station controls its own poll software and can set its own terms.

How this ballot sits beside its Missouri neighbours

Missouri has a busy public-vote scene, and most of the programs on this site share one shape: a publication or community platform invites residents to vote for favorite local businesses across many categories. The A-List St. Louis Magazine ballot, the Best of KC program, Best of Southwest Missouri, the Columbia Missourian Reader's Choice Awards, Columbia MO CommunityVotes and the Feast Magazine program all follow that business-best-of model in their own markets.

The Sedalia Person of the Year poll breaks the pattern in three ways. First, the subject is a person or group, not a business category, and the criterion is influence on the Sedalia area for better or for worse, borrowed from TIME Magazine's Person of the Year issue. Second, the host is a radio station's own website, kxkx.com, rather than a magazine site or a dedicated contest platform, so there is no promotions calendar, no sponsor package structure and no category roster in the way the magazine ballots have. Third, the scale is a single community: Sedalia, Missouri, not a metro region or the whole state.

For a finalist or a supporter, those differences are practical. A person-of-the-year campaign is won by mobilizing a town's personal networks, not a business's customer list, and the low-friction poll on the station's own page means every ask can end with a direct link. The station's December timing also concentrates the whole campaign into a short window at the end of the year.