CFA Cutest Kids & Pets 2025: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the CFA Cutest Kids & Pets ballot is and who runs it

CFA Cutest Kids & Pets 2025 is a photo voting promotion run by The Pilot Promotions, the promotions operation tied to The Pilot, the newspaper whose mailing address sits at P.O. Box 58, Southern Pines, NC 28388. Unlike the publisher's broad readers-choice ballots, this one is built around a single feel-good subject: photographs of local children and their pets, submitted by families and judged by public vote.

The ballot lives on Second Street, the contest platform that hosts the publisher's whole promotions portfolio at pilot.secondstreetapp.com. The platform classifies the promotion as UGCVoting with the UGCVotingPhoto subtype, which in practice means the entries are user-uploaded photographs and the outcome is decided by whoever collects the most supporter votes inside the window.

The market is North Carolina, and specifically the Southern Pines area that The Pilot serves. The publisher's Second Street account carries hundreds of promotions for this market, from text opt-ins to sweepstakes and raffles, but this kids and pets ballot is the only one of its vertical on the account.

For readers comparing North Carolina public-vote programs, the closest neighbours by publisher are the state's best-of ballots such as Best of North Carolina, though those cover businesses rather than family photos.

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

Confirmed editions of this program exist for 2023 and 2025. The 2023 cycle opened December 27, 2023, and the platform listing for the pair of promotions runs from that December date through January 24, 2025, which is when the most recent edition closed. The 2025 window itself is printed as January 2 through January 24, 2025, a roughly three-week voting stretch that began right after the new year.

That shape suggests the program is a turn-of-the-year fixture for The Pilot Promotions: a photo submission stretch in late December followed by voting through most of January. The next edition is expected in 2026, but the organizer has yet to publish an opening date, a submission deadline or a close date for it anywhere on the published listing.

Two gaps matter for anyone planning around this ballot. The Pilot Promotions has kept the category lineup for the kids and pets ballot off its published listing, along with any per-supporter vote limit or eligibility terms; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The second gap is the 2026 calendar itself, which will only become firm when the publisher opens the next promotion on its Second Street account.

One practical note on the ballot address: the current URL carries the 2025 edition, and a second PASS-listed address, pilot.secondstreetapp.com/CFA-Jan-Cutest-Kids--Pets, is associated with the program. Both addresses have served this promotion, so a supporter who bookmarked the 2023 cycle may land on a slightly different path than one arriving for 2026.

How a supporter votes on the kids and pets ballot today

The mechanic is simple by design, and that simplicity is why family photo ballots like this one travel well through Southern Pines social feeds. A supporter opens the ballot at pilot.secondstreetapp.com/CFA-Cutest-Kids--Pet-2025, browses the gallery of submitted kids and pets photographs, picks a favorite and presses the vote control on that entry's page. Second Street logs the choice as a public vote, no purchase and no newspaper subscription involved.

Because the promotion type is UGCVotingPhoto, the entries themselves come from the audience: families upload a photograph during the submission stretch, and the ballot then turns those uploads into the voting field. The 2025 listing shows the promotion as closed, so a supporter arriving now sees the finished edition rather than a live form.

Nothing in the published listing governs repeat voting for this promotion. No per-supporter cap, no one-vote-per-day statement and no eligibility terms appear anywhere on it, so the voting controls on the live form are the only authority on how often one person may return. If the 2026 edition adds a login step or a daily limit, it will show up there, not in advance.

For families entering a future cycle, the sequence is the reverse: upload the photo when submissions open, then spend the voting window rallying supporters. The votes guide on this site walks through that outreach in detail.

How this ballot sits beside its North Carolina neighbours

The Pilot Promotions' kids and pets ballot is an outlier in the North Carolina public-vote field, and the contrast is the fastest way to understand it. Most of the state's well-known ballots are business or sports rankings: Best of North Carolina and the Daily Reflector Best Of Pitt County ask readers to pick favorite local businesses, while the Charlotte Observer Athlete of the Week and its boys and girls high-school editions rank individual competitors. The Charlotte Magazine Best of the Best Awards is a metro readers-choice program.

This ballot instead ranks family photographs. There are no business categories, no athlete nominees and no commercial stakes; the subjects are children and pets from the publisher's own circulation area, and the emotional pull of the gallery is what drives the vote count rather than customer loyalty to a shop.

The publisher differs too. The Charlotte programs answer to metro dailies and the Pitt County ballot to a Greenville paper, while this one belongs to The Pilot Promotions in Southern Pines, a smaller market with a community-paper audience. Its Second Street account also runs sweepstakes and raffles that share nothing with the photo vote beyond the platform.

Timing separates it as well: the confirmed windows straddle New Year, December 27 through January 24 across the 2023 and 2025 editions, while most readers-choice ballots in the state run on spring or summer schedules. A supporter looking for an award-style ballot with a purchase route can compare award vote packages against the business ballots instead.

Strengthening support for a kids and pets photo entry

Because this ballot ranks photographs rather than businesses, the support that wins is personal rather than commercial. A family's realistic levers are the people who already know the child or the pet: relatives, school networks, church groups and neighborhood chats in the Southern Pines area. Share the direct entry link rather than the ballot root, so every click lands on the photo instead of a gallery the supporter must search.

The multi-week window rewards pacing. The confirmed 2025 edition ran January 2 through January 24, so an entry that rallies supporters steadily across three weeks avoids the late surge that platforms often scrutinize. Ask each supporter once, then ask again near the close only if the ballot's own controls allow a return; the published listing states no repeat-vote rule, so the live form governs.

The organizer prints no statement on outside vote help for this promotion, which means any purchased support carries whatever risk the platform's general terms impose. Anyone weighing that route should read the pricing and delivery notes on buying votes online first, and set expectations accordingly: no vote service can promise a first-place finish in a public photo vote.