Daily Courier Readers' Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

Three confirmed editions: 2023, 2024, and 2026, not four straight years

Daily Courier Readers' Choice Awards is Forest City, North Carolina's readers'-choice business ballot, run by The Daily Courier through its Second Street account at thedigitalcourier.secondstreetapp.com. Three editions are confirmed: 2023, 2024, and 2026. The most recent one ran May 4 through June 23, 2026.

The ballot page lists no category roster and no per-supporter limit; confirm on the live ballot each cycle, since three non-consecutive years of history has not produced a published category list so far.

Six North Carolina ballots, one publisher for Forest City's own list

The Daily Courier keeps Readers' Choice Awards on its own Second Street account. Five other North Carolina ballots sit alongside it on this list, each answering to a different publisher.

What the split between publishers means for Forest City

None of those six ballots share a results page with Daily Courier Readers' Choice Awards, and a business recognized on Forest City's own list carries no automatic weight anywhere else. Searching only by a program's general "best of North Carolina" phrasing risks landing on one of the other six instead of thedigitalcourier.secondstreetapp.com specifically. Because the vote is decided by whoever actually shows up to cast one, not by an editorial board reviewing entries after the fact, the tally that counts lives on The Daily Courier's own platform rather than in any secondhand summary.

Forest City is the market label on this ballot, nothing wider

Forest City is the market The Daily Courier's platform account is labeled under, and nothing published extends the ballot's reach beyond it. No neighboring-town list, no county reference, and no note about which readers count toward a vote appear on thedigitalcourier.secondstreetapp.com for this program.

The same Second Street account also runs several other promotions besides Readers' Choice Awards, including a long-running sweepstakes, a recurring quarterly cash sweepstakes, and a separate summer photo-voting contest. Neither is Readers' Choice Awards itself, and neither one carries the same ballot, results, or winner list.

A reader should treat this ballot's reach the way The Daily Courier's own platform frames it, Forest City. Whether a nearby business outside that market label still counts is left to the reader and the business, not a rule the platform has published.

Three editions, not four straight years, still beats a first-year ballot

Three confirmed editions, spread across 2023, 2024, and 2026, still give a Forest City business more to go on than a brand-new ballot offers, even with a gap in the middle. The practical move is figuring out which real customers will actually turn up at thedigitalcourier.secondstreetapp.com once the next window opens, then circling back to them rather than sending a single message close to a deadline.

That approach does not change based on how a future cycle ends up structured. Real readers, asked directly and repeatedly, move a ballot like this whether the eventual rule turns out capped, uncapped, or never published at all. An entry padded with automated or fake activity risks losing everything gained so far, and a program with a documented gap year already has less room to absorb that kind of mistake than one with an unbroken run.

Making the ballot and winning it are two separate steps, and The Daily Courier alone decides the second once its own process concludes. Is buying votes legal walks through what keeps a Forest City push on the right side of the line, and it is the page to check before any money moves. For a sense of how paid support fits into a program like this, buying votes online is the starting point, and award-vote campaign planning was written around exactly this shape.