Cutest Pet Contest 2025 (stokesnews): How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Cutest Pet Contest is and who runs it

The Cutest Pet Contest is a reader photo vote staged by Stokes News, a community newspaper whose office stands at 122 S. Main Street in King, North Carolina, the heart of Stokes County. The paper invites local pet owners to submit pictures of their animals and then hands the judging to the public: whoever draws the most supporter votes wins the edition.

The 2025 edition ran on Second Street, the balloting platform that carries the publisher's entire promotion lineup on its own subdomain. The ballot for the 2025 pet contest lives at stokesnews.secondstreetapp.com/Cutest-Pet-Contest-2025, and the platform classifies the promotion as a photo voting contest, which is the format you would expect for a cutest-pet vertical: entries are pictures, and supporters vote on the pictures they like best.

Stokes News is not a one-contest publisher. The same Second Street account that carried the 2025 pet ballot also carried the newspaper's Readers' Choice ballot in mid-2026, a Christmas lights display vote in December 2025, trivia quizzes and several sweepstakes. The pet contest is the publisher's annual fixture in the pet vertical, and it is the edition of that fixture covered on this page.

The dated run: editions, windows and what is not published

The newest confirmed run is the 2025 edition, and it closes out a long streak. The contest has appeared every year from 2020 through 2025, and each edition keeps its own dated page on the publisher's Second Street subdomain, so the 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 ballots remain reachable at their own addresses alongside the 2025 one. That unbroken string of autumn editions makes the contest a yearly fixture on the Stokes News calendar, not a one-off event.

The 2025 window opened on October 22 and closed on November 26, 2025, a stretch of roughly five weeks that is now closed. The platform listing marks the promotion as a photo voting contest for the whole of that span, with no separate nomination round printed alongside it. Whether future editions keep the same late-October opening is not stated anywhere by the newspaper.

Two details a supporter might want are missing from everything the publisher has put out for this contest. Stokes News has not printed the lineup of pet categories for the ballot, and it has not published any ceiling on repeat voting by a single supporter or any eligibility rule for entrants; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Every other fact on this page rests on dated evidence the publisher and its platform have already made public.

How a supporter votes on the 2025 ballot

Voting could hardly be simpler, since the contest is built for a small-town readership rather than for contest veterans. The route runs through the ballot page on the publisher's Second Street subdomain: scroll the pet photo entries, tap the picture of the animal you favour, and the vote is cast. No payment step appears anywhere on the page, and the whole flow is designed to be finished in a minute or two on a phone.

Because the format is a photo vote, the picture does most of the persuading. A sharp, well-lit photo of a pet gives its owner something supporters respond to on sight, which matters in a contest where most voters are choosing between dozens of animals they have never met. Owners who share their entry link directly, rather than making friends hunt for it on the ballot, remove the single biggest drop-off point in the flow.

Two practical questions are left to the live page. The ballot does not state whether casting a vote requires an email sign-in or any account at all, and it does not state whether a supporter may come back on another day and cast another vote. Both behaviours are common on Second Street photo ballots, but the newspaper has not printed its own answers, so the terms displayed during an open window are the ones that count.

Where this ballot sits among its North Carolina neighbours

Inside the publisher's own calendar, the pet contest is the autumn photo vote that sits between the summer Readers' Choice ballot, which ran June 16 to July 14 in 2026, and the Best Christmas Lights Display vote, which ran December 2 to December 29 in 2025. The same Second Street account also carried trivia quizzes in February, June and July of 2026 and several five-thousand-dollar sweepstakes, so the pet contest is one thread in a year-round promotion schedule rather than the paper's only public vote.

Across the state, other North Carolina publishers run their own pet ballots that answer to different newsrooms. The Mount Airy News Cutest Pet Contest is the closest cousin in the north of the region, while the O.Henry Pet Photo Contest and the The Pilot Cutest Kids and Pets Contest serve other Piedmont audiences. Statewide best-of ballots such as the Best of North Carolina program and the Charlotte Magazine Best of the Best Awards cover businesses rather than pets, and the Charlotte Observer Athlete of the Week sits in a different vertical altogether.

What sets the Stokes News edition apart is its scale and its home: a single county newspaper in King running one photo vote for local animals, on a ballot that has kept the same address pattern every autumn since 2020.

Strengthening support in a county photo vote

A ballot this local rewards steady, personal outreach over anything elaborate. The winning entries in a cutest-pet vote are usually the ones whose owners treat the five-week window as a campaign: they post the entry link the day the ballot opens, they ask again at the halfway point, and they remind their circles in the final days when casual voters are deciding. Because the format is a photo, pairing each reminder with the picture itself outperforms a bare link.

The newspaper has not printed a position on organized outside help for this contest, so an owner planning to bring in votes beyond friends and family should read the rules on the live ballot first. For a plain-language tour of outreach that fits a community newspaper ballot, our votes guide covers the options, and award contest voting explains how purchased support is generally arranged for ballots of this shape.