Costume Contest 2025: How Voting Works & How to Win

A Halloween ballot unlike Montana's best-of polls

Most programs covered in the Montana section of this site share a shape: a newspaper or a community-votes partner runs a readers-choice poll where local businesses compete across service categories for weeks. Best of Billings and Gallatin's Greatest both work that way. Whitepine's Costume Contest 2025 breaks the pattern on almost every axis. It is a seasonal holiday event rather than a business ranking, it covers two counties rather than a single city, and it is co-sponsored by a lender, RedHouse Lending, rather than published by a media outlet.

The ballot itself is a PollUnit page at pollunit.com/en/polls/whitepinehalloween, announced by the organizer with the line "Our 3rd Annual Online Costume Contest is here with RedHouse Lending returning as the 2025 co-sponsor." That single sentence carries most of what a supporter needs to identify the program: the organizer, the sponsor, the edition count and the holiday it hangs on. The contest's own hashtags in the organizer's promotion tie it to both Missoula and Bitterroot audiences, matching the two-county footprint in the ballot's title.

Facts at a glance

The 2025 dates and what the organizer leaves unstated

The dated facts for this program all come from the ballot page and the organizer's announcement around it. The submission period ran from October 8 at 06:00 AM until November 4 at 09:00 AM, so entrants had roughly the second half of October to complete the entry form with their costume photos. Voting then opened on November 4 at 07:00 AM, and the organizer's announcement described online voting as running from November 4th to November 5th and open to the public.

The edition history is short and clearly marked. The 2025 ballot calls itself the third annual online costume contest, and the organizer's 2024 page called that year's run the second annual, with RedHouse Lending already credited as co-sponsor then. The program is therefore an established Halloween fixture in its third year, not a new launch, even though the only edition year carried a full live ballot is 2025.

Whitepine prints no per-supporter vote limit, no eligibility rule for entrants or voters, and no statement on how often a person may return to the poll; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The same holds for the next cycle: no 2026 dates, theme or sponsor arrangement have been announced anywhere on the organizer's pages.

How a supporter votes on the PollUnit ballot

Voting on this ballot takes almost no setup. A supporter opens the Whitepine page at pollunit.com/en/polls/whitepinehalloween during the voting window and finds photo entries grouped into the costume categories Solo, Group, Kid, Pet, and Home/Decor. Each category will have a winner and a runner-up, and an overall Best of Show grand prize sits above them all, so a vote placed in any category feeds that category's own result rather than a single combined leaderboard.

Entering works differently from voting. The ballot instructs participants to complete the form to enter, and the form was open from October 8 at 06:00 AM until November 4 at 09:00 AM in the 2025 cycle. That means an entrant's work finishes before voting begins, and the voting days are purely about rallying support for an entry that already exists. The organizer's promotion also notes that photos may be shared on its and RedHouse Lending's social media accounts, which is how entries travel beyond the ballot page itself.

Because the vote is described as open to the public, no residency or membership claim is printed as a condition of casting a ballot. Whether the platform asks a voter to sign in, or how many times a vote can be cast from the same device, is not spelled out on the page; the practical answer is to open the ballot, pick a favorite in a category, and follow whatever prompt the PollUnit page presents.

Where this ballot sits among Montana's contest programs

Montana's contest landscape on this site is dominated by city and regional best-of polls, and the contrast with Whitepine's event is what makes this page useful. Best of Whitefish serves a single resort town's business scene. Bozeman's Choice and Community Votes Bozeman both cover the Gallatin Valley's business community from different publishers, while Community Votes Billings does the same for the state's largest city. Every one of those is a business-ranking poll with a long category list and a newspaper or platform publisher behind it.

Costume Contest 2025 is the odd one out in three ways. First, its subject is households and their costumes, not businesses and their services, so the competitive field is families, kids, pets and decorated homes rather than restaurants and shops. Second, its geography is a two-county corridor, Missoula and Ravalli, rather than one city's limits. Third, its calendar is a single Halloween window each fall rather than a months-long readers-choice season, which compresses all campaigning into a few days.

For a supporter, that difference matters practically. A best-of poll rewards weeks of steady outreach to customers; a costume contest rewards a sharp push across the November 4 to 5 voting window while entries are fresh in friends' feeds. The two formats rarely compete for the same attention, which is why both kinds of ballot coexist across the state.

Making the most of a two-day voting window

The single most important planning fact for an entrant is how short the voting window is. With online voting running November 4 to 5, there is no long tail of days to recover a slow start, so the entry photo and the ask to friends need to be ready before the submission form closes on November 4 at 09:00 AM. Sharing the entry directly on personal social channels the moment voting opens is the move that fits this ballot's shape, and RedHouse Lending's own promotion of the contest gives entrants a second, larger audience their posts can ride on.

Whitepine has not printed any rule about soliciting votes or about outside help, so the safe assumption is simply that the public vote counts what the public casts. The tactics in how to get more votes online that rely on genuine outreach, timing and shareable photos are the ones that match a holiday costume poll; anything that depends on volume rather than real supporters fits this ballot's short window poorly.