Reader's Choice 2025: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Reader's Choice 2025 ballot is and who runs it

Reader's Choice 2025 is a best-of awards ballot run by The Daily Gazette, the independent, family-owned daily newspaper published in Schenectady, New York. The program sits in the business best-of vertical: readers vote for the local businesses and services they rate highest, and the Gazette presents the results as its readers' choices for the year. It is a public vote, so participation is open to the newspaper's audience rather than to a jury or a panel.

Second Street, a balloting platform used by many local publishers, hosts the ballot at dailygazette.secondstreetapp.com, the same domain the Gazette uses for its other reader promotions. The confirmed voting address for this edition is the Readers-Choice-2025 page, and the newspaper's organization on that platform carries several other promotions alongside it, including Best of the Best 2026 and a set of sweepstakes.

Facts at a glance

For a Schenectady business, the practical point is that this is the newspaper's own reader poll, separate from the promotion pages that share the same domain. A placement in Reader's Choice rests entirely on the votes supporters cast during the open window, which is why the dates in the next section matter more than anything printed after the ballot closes.

The dated record: which editions ran and when the window fell

Two editions of Reader's Choice are confirmed, 2024 and 2025. The 2025 edition is the better documented of the pair: its ballot ran as a voting promotion from September 13 through October 6, 2025, and that window has closed. The 2024 edition sits at its own Second Street address, the 2024-Readers-Choice page, which confirms the program ran in back-to-back years under the same organizer.

Because the program has a 2024 edition and a 2025 edition, it is treated as annual, and the next expected run is 2026. No dates for a 2026 edition have been announced, so any nomination or voting calendar beyond the closed 2025 window has to come from the Gazette's own pages when it publishes them.

Two facts are missing from everything the newspaper has put out in advance. The category roster for Reader's Choice does not appear outside the live ballot, and no voting rules, per-supporter limit or eligibility text has been printed alongside it; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

The same gap applies to the timing details of the 2025 cycle that the ballot does not restate, such as whether a nomination round preceded the voting phase. The confirmed promotion is registered as a straight voting ballot with the September 13 to October 6 window, and nothing further about earlier phases has been published.

For readers comparing dates across years, the useful anchor is that both known editions lived at distinct addresses on the same Second Street organization, which makes the ballot page itself the reliable source for whatever calendar the Gazette sets next.

How a supporter votes in the Reader's Choice ballot

Supporting a business in the Gazette's Reader's Choice is a plain public-vote mechanic on Second Street. A supporter opens dailygazette.secondstreetapp.com, reaches the Reader's Choice ballot for the current edition, and picks nominees in the categories shown. The 2025 ballot accepted votes from September 13 until October 6, 2025, after which the promotion shows as closed.

Because the Gazette has not published its category roster in advance, a supporter sees the full list only on the ballot itself. That is also where any verification step appears. Nothing published ahead of time describes an account requirement, so the practical instruction is simple: open the ballot during the window, select a nominee in each category you care about, and submit.

The unpublished rules matter just as much to a campaign. The newspaper has not stated how often a supporter may return to the ballot or submit in a category, so a business planning its outreach should treat whatever the live page enforces as the only limit that exists.

For supporters, the sequence is worth rehearsing before the window opens, because Reader's Choice ballots on Second Street typically carry many categories and the window lasts a few weeks. Telling a customer the exact category name, the ballot address and the close date removes every excuse for not finishing the vote. For a fuller playbook that works inside any ballot's rules, see our guide on getting more votes, which covers reminders, timing and honest outreach rather than tricks that an unpublished rule might penalize.

How this ballot sits beside its New York neighbours

Reader's Choice belongs to a wider family of New York best-of ballots, but it is the only one in the set answered to a Schenectady newspaper. The City's Best, Best of New York City, Best of Brooklyn, Best of Queens, Best of the Bronx, Best of Westchester and Best of Hudson Valley each answer to their own publisher, and a vote cast in one carries no weight in any other.

What makes the Gazette's program distinct is its publisher and its promotion family. The Daily Gazette is a family-owned daily paper in Schenectady, not a metro magazine, and its Second Street organization runs Reader's Choice alongside Best of the Best 2026, a nomination-and-voting ballot that opened July 12, 2026 and runs through September 14, 2026, plus several sweepstakes. A Schenectady business can therefore appear in more than one Gazette promotion in the same year, but each promotion has its own page, its own window and its own rules.

The difference matters for planning. Reader's Choice 2025 was registered as a straight voting ballot with the September 13 to October 6 window, while Best of the Best 2026 pairs a nomination phase with voting. Treating the two as interchangeable, or borrowing dates or category assumptions across them, is how campaigns go wrong.

For comparison shopping among New York ballots, the sibling pages above give each market's own edition history and mechanics, and each is documented from its own organizer rather than generalized from the Gazette's program.

Strengthening support inside the Gazette's rules

A Reader's Choice campaign in Schenectady lives or dies on the published window. The 2025 ballot accepted votes between September 13 and October 6, 2025, so reminders sent after the close date are worthless, and reminders sent near the close do the most good. The newspaper has not published any policy text about outside help, paid or otherwise, alongside the ballot, which makes the safe strategy the obvious strategy: ask real customers, name the category, give the dailygazette.secondstreetapp.com address and let the live form handle the rest.

No cap on repeat voting and no eligibility text has been printed by the Gazette anywhere ahead of the ballot, so a business cannot plan around a published ceiling. That uncertainty is an argument for broad, honest outreach across the whole customer base rather than a concentrated push that a later rule might penalize. General options for strengthening a public-vote campaign, and what a purchase can and cannot do, are set out on the award votes page.