KQTV Best of St. Joe: How Voting Works & How to Win

Nine editions in, the strongest fact here is the pattern itself

Nine editions, one after another. That is the confirmed run behind Best of St. Joe, KQTV's readers' choice ballot for St. Joseph, Missouri. The earliest confirmed round traces to 2017, and the most recent one closed April 21, 2025, after opening February 14. A St. Joseph business weighing whether to enter is looking at a ballot with nine years of history behind it already, not a first-year experiment.

KQTV, the St. Joseph television station, organizes Best of St. Joe on the Second Street platform, at kq2.secondstreetapp.com. Second Street runs a shared nomination-and-voting format for stations and papers across the country, so the mechanics here, submit a business, then vote for it, follow that structure rather than something built locally from scratch.

Treat that last row as it is: confirm on the live ballot each cycle, since even a nine-year-old ballot can change its own published rules from one round to the next.

Missouri runs several of these ballots; Best of St. Joe is only one

"Best of" plus a Missouri place name is a common combination, and St. Joseph's own version answers to nobody but KQTV. Other Missouri markets run the identical idea under entirely separate ownership.

None of those six settle a single result alongside Best of St. Joe. St. Louis's own A-List ballot, the Southwest Missouri ballot, and Columbia's pair, the Missourian's Reader's Choice Awards and Columbia MO CommunityVotes, each run their own separate process. Best of KC and Feast Magazine's FEAST 50 do too. A St. Joseph business that also enters one of these six is running two unrelated campaigns with two unrelated rulebooks, not one combined push.

What that means for a search this week

Typing "Missouri best of" into a search bar can land on any of the seven programs above, or on an older listing that no longer matches this year's KQTV page. Only kq2.secondstreetapp.com settles what Best of St. Joe itself is doing right now.

One KQTV login, several unrelated promotions

KQTV's Second Street login carries plenty besides Best of St. Joe. Out of the Ballpark runs as a sweepstakes rather than a vote. A quarterly cash sweepstakes cycles through its own separate calendar. Senior Greetings, sponsored by Highland Community College, is a photo gallery, and a holiday cash giveaway plus a concert-ticket giveaway fill out the rest of that same account. Best of St. Joe's own rules stay untouched by any of it; the promotions simply share a login, nothing more.

Categories and any vote cap go unpublished; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Whoever submits a St. Joseph nomination is working from a page silent on both fronts: no formal category roster appears, and no rule fixes a ceiling on repeat voting.

Nine straight confirmed years suggests KQTV settled on a format it repeats rather than one it is still testing. Even so, the specifics, category names included, are for the live page to state each time a window opens, not something safely carried over from a prior round.

Timing a push around a repeating February-to-April window

Every confirmed Best of St. Joe window opened in February and closed by late April, most recently February 14 through April 21, 2025. A St. Joseph business planning ahead should watch for that stretch to reopen rather than pencil in a fixed date, since exact 2026 dates are not yet published; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

That same rhythm, nine years running, is worth building outreach around. Supporters who hear from a business more than once across a two-month stretch respond better than ones who get a single message right before the deadline, and automated or fake activity puts the nomination itself at risk rather than helping it. A nomination and a win are two different things, and only KQTV settles the win once its own review is finished. is buying votes legal separates a legitimate push from a risky one, buying votes online walks through what paid help usually involves for a nomination-then-vote format, and award-vote campaign planning is written around ballots shaped exactly like this one.