VOTE to decide the Sun-News' Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes and why Las Cruces readers decide this award

The Las Cruces Sun-News runs VOTE to decide the Sun-News' Athlete of the Week as a reader-decided honor for high school athletes in its southern New Mexico coverage area. The newspaper does the selecting that matters most: its staff nominates several athletes every week, drawn from the sports currently in season around Las Cruces. The readers then take over. Once the nominees are posted, the winner is decided entirely by whoever shows up and votes, which is what makes the ballot a genuine public vote rather than an editors' pick wearing a poll's clothes.

The vote itself lives on Crowdsignal under the poll.fm domain, at poll.fm/16476478. That host choice matters to supporters in a practical way. Crowdsignal ballots are simple pages with a nominee list and a vote button, no newspaper registration and no paywall standing in front of the form, so a student section, a family group chat or a team parent loop can push a nominee with nothing more than the link.

The confirmed ballot on file covered Dec. 29 through Jan. 3 and focused on girls' basketball, with nominees from the Las Cruces, Mayfield and Centennial programs. That mix of school and sport is the ballot's usual texture: whichever sport is hot that week supplies the names, and the community around those schools supplies the votes.

The dated record: seasons, the confirmed window and what is not published

Confirmed seasons of this weekly series span 2022, 2024, 2025 and 2026. Each of those years held a run of weekly ballots rather than a single contest, because the newspaper nominates athletes for the award every week while school sports are in play. A weekly series is one program producing many short votes, so the year list describes seasons, not individual winners.

The one window with full dates attached is the ballot covering Dec. 29 through Jan. 3, which now reads Poll Closed on the poll page. That span sits over the New Year, which tells supporters something useful about the shape of the season: ballots keep running through the holiday stretch instead of pausing for it.

Several facts the ballot does not carry forward are worth naming plainly. The newspaper has not published the opening and closing dates of each future weekly round in advance, so the next window's exact days confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The paper also prints no standing list of which sports or award categories the series will cover across a season; the nominee slate on each ballot simply reflects that week's fixtures. And the platform carries no published round calendar for the whole season, only the ballot currently open.

What is published is the rule that matters most to anyone campaigning for a nominee. The organizer's stated position is that there are no voting restrictions, so the instruction to readers is to vote now and vote often. That sentence, in the newspaper's own promotion of the poll, is the closest thing the program has to a rulebook.

How a supporter votes on the live ballot right now

Voting takes under a minute, and the lack of friction is the design. A supporter opens the current poll page on poll.fm, reads the nominee list, which pairs each athlete with their school and sport, clicks the chosen name and submits the form. There is no login, no email confirmation and no newspaper subscription step printed anywhere on the ballot. Crowdsignal counts the choice and shows the running tally the same way it does for every newsroom poll it hosts.

Because the organizer says there are no voting restrictions, a determined supporter is not limited to a single click. The newspaper's own words invite readers to vote now and vote often, which means returning to the page repeatedly while the weekly window stays open. For a nominee with an organized backing group, that is the entire game: keep the link in front of people who care, and keep them clicking until the poll flips to closed.

Timing matters more than anything else in a weekly format. A ballot lives for days, not weeks, and the confirmed Dec. 29 to Jan. 3 span shows how short each window is. A push that starts on the last evening has already lost most of its runway, so the practical habit is to vote early in the window and keep the reminder loop running through the week.

One caution belongs here too. Each weekly ballot is its own poll with its own nominees, so votes never carry over and the address for the current round can shift as new ballots replace closed ones. The page a supporter saved last week may already read Poll Closed.

How this ballot sits beside other New Mexico fan votes

New Mexico's public-vote scene splits into two families, and this program belongs to the weekly high school sports one. Its closest cousins are the KRQE Mesa Tractor Athlete of the Week, a television station's version of the same idea, and the New Mexico High School Football Star of the Week, which narrows to one sport. The Top-Performing High School Baseball Hitters ballot rounds out the school sports group with a stat-based honor.

The second family is reader's-choice and best-of voting, run by different publishers in different cities. The Albuquerque Journal Readers' Choice is the largest, while Best of Santa Fe and Best of Taos serve their own northern communities.

What separates the Sun-News ballot from all of them is tempo and scope. It is anchored to one newspaper's city, Las Cruces, it resets every week during the season, and its nominees rotate with the sports calendar, so a girls' basketball player in late December and a spring athlete months later compete under the same award name in different rounds. Supporters who follow more than one of these programs should treat each ballot as a separate race with its own window, a fresh nominee slate and an independent tally, because none of the votes share a ballot or a deadline.

Pushing a nominee harder in a no-restrictions weekly poll

This ballot is unusually friendly to organized support because the organizer has said outright that there are no voting restrictions. Where many contests cap each person at one vote, the newspaper's instruction is vote now and vote often. A nominee's realistic path to winning is therefore repetition and reach: the people who already care vote as often as they can, and the nominee's circle works to enlarge that group before the window shuts.

Concretely, that means posting the poll link where the school community already gathers, pairing it with a reminder near the window's final hours, and asking people to come back rather than vote once. The confirmed weekly rhythm, illustrated by the Dec. 29 to Jan. 3 span, shows why the final-hours reminder matters; a short ballot rewards late momentum as much as early leads.

The organizer publishes no rule against outside help, and nothing on the ballot addresses it either way. Anyone weighing paid support should start from what is actually true about this poll: it is free, unlimited by the organizer's own statement, and won weekly by whoever mobilizes best. Compare the mechanics of purchased support for polls like this one at buy award votes before spending anything, and remember that no service can promise a result in a poll the newspaper tallies.