Reader's Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Reader's Choice Awards are and who runs them

The Reader's Choice Awards are a best-of programme in which the readers of the Perryville Republic Monitor name and vote for their local favourites. The organizer is Republic-Monitor, the publisher whose masthead reads Perryville Republic Monitor, a newspaper operating from Perryville, Missouri. The ballot sits at republicmonitor.com/readerschoice/ and runs inside the newspaper's own domain rather than on a separately branded balloting platform, so the form, the rules and the winners all answer to the publisher directly.

Structurally it is the format most Missouri readers already recognise: a broad list of categories covering local businesses, services and community favourites, decided entirely by public vote. This is a best-of vertical, supporters simply pick their favourite, and the audience is the newspaper's own readership in Perryville and across its southeast Missouri circulation area.

Facts at a glance

Because the publisher runs the vote itself, everything a supporter needs sits on one domain. There is no third-party ballot to chase, and the paper's news pages around the form are what readers navigate past on the way to voting.

The dates behind the Readers Choice ballot

The 2026 edition is live: the ballot at republicmonitor.com/readerschoice() was up and running in September 2026, and the newspaper's own site carries it through that month. This is the first confirmed edition; whether it returns next year is not yet published; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

One earlier cycle left a printed trail. A Perryville Republic Monitor publication from September 2024 set out the two-round structure in full: digital nominations ran Sept. 16 - Sept. 28, 2024, and digital voting followed on Oct. 1 - Oct. 15, 2024. That sheet is the only source for those dates, and it shows the programme was running before 2026, which fits the newspaper's history of community awards work.

What the live page does not carry is just as useful. The current ballot prints no category roster, and no rules sheet covering a per-person vote limit or nominee eligibility is attached to it anywhere; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. No closing date for the 2026 window is printed either, so anyone planning a push should watch the form itself rather than assume the 2024 October rhythm repeats.

The practical reading: the two-round shape, nomination first and voting second, is the pattern the publisher has demonstrated, and the fall season is when the ballot has actually run.

How a supporter votes in the Readers Choice Awards today

Voting happens on the newspaper's own site. A supporter opens republicmonitor.com/readerschoice/, finds the category they care about, and selects or writes in their favourite. The printed 2024 cycle split the work into two passes: during the nomination round a reader supplied the name of a local favourite, and once voting opened the same reader picked from the nominees that had gathered. A supporter who wants a particular business on the ballot therefore has two jobs at two different times, and missing the nomination round means waiting for the next cycle to put a name forward.

The form is open to the newspaper's readers without any stated purchase or membership requirement, and the ballot page names no login step. Because the publisher runs the vote directly, nothing in the process involves a third-party platform account.

Three things are worth checking on the live form before casting anything. First, whether the ballot is currently in its nomination phase or its voting phase, since the printed 2024 dates show about a week between the close of one and the open of the other. Second, any wording limiting how often a single reader may cast a vote, which the current page does not print. Third, the confirmation the page gives after submission, which is the only receipt a supporter gets.

How this ballot sits beside its Missouri neighbours

Perryville is not the only Missouri community with a public-vote best-of programme, and the Reader's Choice Awards belong to a busy field. At the state level, the A-List St. Louis Magazine ballot serves the St. Louis metro, while Best of Southwest Missouri covers the Springfield corner of the state. Columbia carries two of its own: the Columbia Missourian Reader's Choice Awards run by the university-affiliated paper, and Columbia MO CommunityVotes. Readers on the western side of the state have Best of KC, and the food press runs the Feast Magazine FEAST 50 for St. Louis dining.

What separates the Perryville ballot from every one of those is scale and ownership. It belongs to a single small-city newspaper, runs on that newspaper's own domain instead of a national balloting service, and answers to a readership that knows the nominees by walking past them. A nomination here is a neighbour's name, not a metro-wide brand, and the vote total needed to win reflects a small-town audience rather than a statewide one.

For a business owner, that means the winning playbook is local outreach, not volume.

Strengthening support on the Perryville ballot

The action a supporter takes is simple: open the ballot at republicmonitor.com/readerschoice() and select the nominee. The hard part is getting enough people to do it during the short voting round the 2024 dates illustrate. Ground the push in Perryville itself: print the ballot address on receipts, ask at the counter, and post it where local customers already follow the business. The nomination round matters too, because a favourite that is not nominated cannot be voted for later.

Stay inside the newspaper's rules. The ballot page prints no statement about outside voting help, so anything that looks like volume from one source is a risk the publisher can judge on its own terms. The safest reading of what the organizer has shown is that ordinary reader participation is exactly what the format wants, and steady genuine support beats a burst near a deadline nobody has printed.

For broader tactics that work on any public ballot, see our votes guide.