St Louis Post Dispatch I My Arch Photo Contest: How Voting Works & How to Win

A photographer's problem: the daily deadline nobody publishes in advance

If your Gateway Arch photo is on this ballot, your problem is simple and it arrives early: the St. Louis Post-Dispatch prints the closing deadline, Wednesday, June 13, but it does not print the opening day of voting or a separate entry window for the cycle ahead. You cannot plan a get-out-the-vote streak around a date you have to hunt down. The newspaper created the contest to celebrate the summer grand re-opening of the Gateway Arch National Park, and the payoff for top photos is a place in a special St. Louis Post-Dispatch section on Sunday, July 1, which makes the daily push worth organizing well before the deadline arrives.

This page exists so a photographer, a supporter or a curious reader can see what is actually known about the ballot and what is not. The opening day of the voting window, the photo entry period and any prize detail beyond the print feature are not published ahead of time; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Everything else here, from the once-a-day rule to the edition history, comes from the organizer's own ballot page.

Start with the constraint that shapes the whole campaign. The printed instruction is to vote once a day for a favorite photo of the iconic monument, and the voting page adds that users are allowed one vote per day, per category. A single vote from a friend is a rounding error; a friend who comes back every morning until June 13 is the unit of support this ballot is built around.

What the I My Arch photo contest is and who runs it

The St Louis Post Dispatch I My Arch Photo Contest is a public-vote photo competition run by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the daily newspaper of St. Louis, Missouri, whose home on the web is stltoday.com. Second Street hosts the ballot, the contest platform behind the paper's reader voting, at the address stltoday.secondstreetapp.com/St-Louis-Post-Dispatch--I--my-Arch-photo-contest/. The vertical is best-of style reader voting, and the market is the St. Louis metro area, with the newspaper's own address at 901 N. 10th St. in St. Louis anchoring the operation.

The theme is narrow and local. The paper asks readers to submit their best photo of the Gateway Arch, the iconic monument at the heart of the Gateway Arch National Park, as part of the celebration of the park's grand re-opening. Unlike a citywide business ranking, this ballot is a single-subject photo vote, which changes how support works: there is no roster of local merchants to climb past, only the submitted images of one monument.

The dated record: editions from 2015 to 2025 and the June window

The confirmed edition years for this ballot are 2018, 2019, 2020, 2024 and 2025. The Post-Dispatch also traces the photo competition back further: a Washington University in St. Louis publication reported that a senior won the Readers' Choice Grand Prize in the newspaper's 2015 Arch Photo Contest, a special competition showcasing the Arch on its 50th anniversary. So the 2018 edition was not the beginning, and the 2020 to 2024 gap shows the schedule has not been unbroken.

The confirmed voting cycle on the ballot page falls in June. The printed instruction runs through Wednesday, June 13, and the winners' feature, a special section of the newspaper, is dated Sunday, July 1. That pairing of a mid-June deadline and an early-July print date is the shape of the edition the page documents.

The rest of the calendar stays off the page. There is no printed opening day for voting, no entry or nomination dates, and no round schedule from the platform for this market. A photographer planning ahead has the deadline but not the starting gun. The open date, the entry window and the platform's round schedule for the next edition stay unpublished until the form goes live; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Between editions, the newspaper's contest pages on Second Street are the reliable place to watch, because the paper reuses its own platform address when the contest returns.

How a supporter votes today on the Arch ballot

The literal mechanic is short. A supporter opens the ballot on Second Street, looks through the submitted photos of the Gateway Arch, selects a favorite and casts a vote. The printed call to action says to vote once a day through Wednesday, June 13, and the voting page states that users are allowed one vote per day, per category. No login requirement, email verification step or entry fee is described on the ballot page, so the friction a supporter faces is the daily return itself, not a signup wall.

That once-a-day rule is what makes this contest different from a single-ballot reader poll. A photographer's campaign is measured in mornings: each supporter who remembers to come back is worth a full vote, and each who forgets costs a day. Reminders, a shared direct link to the photo and a clear deadline of June 13 are the working tools. The prize on offer, placement in a special St. Louis Post-Dispatch section on Sunday, July 1, is a print honor, so the audience being persuaded is the newspaper's readership as much as the vote counter.

Because the ballot sits on the newspaper's Second Street domain, supporters who arrive through stltoday.com coverage land on the right edition. Anyone linking friends should copy the ballot address for the current cycle rather than an old social post, since the confirmed years show the contest returning with fresh dates each time it appears.

Strengthening support inside this ballot's rules

Support in this contest compounds through repetition, so build the campaign around the daily rule the organizer printed. Ask each supporter to vote every day until Wednesday, June 13, and make the ask specific: the same link, the same photo, the same morning. A reminder on the day before the deadline matters more than an early burst, because a daily supporter lost in the final week cannot be replaced by extra enthusiasm after voting closes.

Work with the theme, not just the ballot. The contest celebrates the Gateway Arch and its national park, so a photographer sharing the photo on social channels reaches people who already love the monument, which converts far better than a generic vote request sent to strangers.

On outside help: the organizer's published rule is one vote per day, per category, and the ballot page states no policy beyond it. Any push that stays inside the once-a-day rule follows the newspaper's own terms. General tactics for widening daily support, and where paid promotion fits, are covered in our guide to getting more votes online.

How this ballot sits beside Missouri's other reader votes

Missouri readers have no shortage of public-vote ballots, and the I My Arch contest occupies a distinct corner of that field. The A-List St. Louis Magazine ballot ranks businesses across the metro, and Feast Magazine FEAST 50 does similar work for dining. Both are broad best-of programs with many categories; the Arch contest is a single-subject photo vote built around one monument.

Outside the metro, Best of KC answers to its own publisher in its own market, the Columbia Missourian Reader's Choice Awards and Columbia MO CommunityVotes serve Columbia, and Best of Southwest Missouri covers the state's southwest region. A ballot in any of those programs asks supporters to choose among local businesses; the Post-Dispatch asks them to choose among photographs of the same landmark, with the reward being a place in the printed newspaper on July 1.

A supporter feels the difference in effort per vote. In a multi-category ranking a backer may be asked to fill a whole ballot; on the Arch contest the entire ask is a single daily vote for a single image, which makes the streak easy to explain and easy to keep until the June 13 deadline.