Mesilla Valley Community's Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Mesilla Valley Community's Choice Awards is and who runs it

A Las Cruces business that discovers it has been nominated for the Mesilla Valley Community's Choice Awards usually has two questions at once: what is this ballot, and who is counting the votes. Both answers sit with the same organization. The program is run by CommunityVotes Las Cruces, which operates the CommunityVotes platform for this market at lascruces.communityvotes.com. The site's masthead describes it as Las Cruces, New Mexico's community voting awards platform for 2026, a place where locals vote for their favorites year after year.

The vertical is best-of: a broad business ballot rather than a single-industry prize. Supporters nominate and then vote for the Las Cruces businesses they rate, and results are presented by category once the window closes. The platform also sells visibility to local businesses; the page carries a Promote Your Business section featuring The Pecan Grill and Brewery, alongside a thank-you message to Las Cruces. That mix, community nominations plus paid promotion slots, is the standard shape of a CommunityVotes market site.

For a nominated business, the practical point is that the audience is local shoppers, not a trade jury. Winning depends on how many Las Cruces supporters you can move to the ballot. The table collects the published facts for the 2026 cycle.

The dated record: editions, the 2026 window and what is unpublished

Two editions of this ballot are on file, in 2025 and in 2026. The edition now being documented is the 2026 one, and its shape is unusual among community ballots because the phases stretch across a year boundary. Nominations started in August 2025, and the nomination period ran from August 3 to November 29. Voting then continues into the new year, ending in January 2026. That long nomination runway gives Las Cruces businesses months to collect support before the voting phase decides the results.

The organizer labels the site as the 2026 platform and carries a 2026 copyright line, which lines up with the voting phase closing in January 2026. Because the ballot has run in both 2025 and 2026, it is reasonable to treat it as a recurring fixture in the Las Cruces market, and the platform's own description of a community that votes each year for its favorites supports that reading. A 2027 cycle has not been announced yet.

Several facts a campaign planner would want are missing from the organizer's page. CommunityVotes Las Cruces leaves the voting phase's exact open and close days, the full category lineup and any per-supporter rule off its page; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The page does confirm that results are presented by category and that a Random Category Auto feature exists, but the details behind those labels live on the ballot itself, not in any summary.

How a supporter votes in the Mesilla Valley Community's Choice Awards today

Voting unfolds as a plain public ballot across two phases. First, nominations: between August 3 and November 29, a supporter submits a Las Cruces business for the ballot. Second, voting: once the ballot is set, supporters pick categories and vote for their favorites, with the window running until January 2026. No purchase, membership or ticket is part of what the organizer describes; the vote is open to the Las Cruces community.

To act on it, go to lascruces.communityvotes.com, the CommunityVotes Las Cruces site. The 2026 ballot is live there. A supporter either fills in a nomination during the nomination phase or, once voting is open, selects a category and casts a vote for the business they want to back. The page's Random Category Auto label suggests the site can serve categories to voters automatically, which matters for businesses because a supporter may reach their category without hunting for it.

What the ballot page does not settle is repetition. Whether one person may vote once per day, once per category, or once per cycle is not stated anywhere on the organizer's page for this program. The practical instruction for a supporter is therefore simple: use the live form as it presents itself, and for a business, the reliable move is asking customers to visit the ballot and vote while the January 2026 window is still open.

How this ballot sits beside its New Mexico neighbours

New Mexico runs several community best-of ballots, and the Mesilla Valley Community's Choice Awards is the Las Cruces entry. Its closest relative is CommunityVotes Albuquerque, which runs on the same platform for a different city; a vote cast in one market carries no weight toward the other. Beyond the platform family, the state's ballot landscape includes the Albuquerque Journal Readers' Choice, run by the state's largest newspaper, and Albuquerque The Magazine's Best of the City, a magazine title.

Northern New Mexico has its own pair: Best of Santa Fe and Best of Taos, each tied to its own town rather than to a statewide audience. Food-system businesses also appear in the Edible New Mexico Local Hero Awards, which narrows to the local food scene. What separates the Mesilla Valley ballot from all of them is geography and publisher: it is the one anchored to Las Cruces and the Mesilla Valley in the state's south, and it answers to CommunityVotes Las Cruces rather than to a newspaper or magazine.

For a business that operates across markets, that matters. A Las Cruces restaurant cannot ride an Albuquerque campaign, and vice versa; each ballot needs its own push aimed at its own community.

Strengthening support for a Las Cruces nomination

A business chasing votes in the Mesilla Valley Community's Choice Awards has one asset the ballot rewards: local customers who already like the place. The organizer's mechanic is a public vote at lascruces.communityvotes.com, open through January 2026, so the work is getting those customers onto the ballot and to the right category. Put the ballot link on receipts, table tents and the business's own social channels, and name the category you are competing in so supporters do not have to search for it.

What CommunityVotes Las Cruces says about outside help, paid pushes or voting software is not stated on its page, so a business that plans anything beyond asking customers directly should read the organizer's own terms on the live site first. The safest campaigns are the ones that would look the same to the organizer as to the customers: real people, voting because the business asked.

For tactics that stay inside those lines, see our guide on getting more votes online, which covers reminder timing, staff prompts and follow-ups built around a public-vote window like this one.