Bismarck Tribune Best of the Best: How Voting Works & How to Win

Two Bismarck ballots share a city, not an organizer

bismarcktribune.secondstreetapp.com. Not bismarck.communityvotes.com. Two different addresses, two different companies, and one shared habit among local businesses of mixing them up during the same nomination season.

The Bismarck Tribune runs its own Best of the Best readers-choice ballot on the SecondStreet platform, contest software licensed from a third-party vendor rather than built in-house. Lee Enterprises owns the Tribune, the same chain behind dozens of daily papers across the Midwest and West. Down the road, unrelated to any of that, Metroland Media runs CommunityVotes Bismarck at its own bismarck.communityvotes.com address. Neither ballot's result counts toward the other's tally, and a business nominated on one has to check that specific site for its own outcome.

That last row is the real reason to keep the two straight. A business that wins a category on the Tribune's ballot has an actual document to point to afterward. A CommunityVotes Bismarck placement, so far, doesn't come with the same paper trail. See the North Dakota contest hub for how both fit next to the state's other readers-choice programs.

Why SecondStreet is the detail worth remembering

SecondStreet isn't unique to Bismarck. It's contest software that a number of newspaper companies license to run nomination-and-voting campaigns rather than build their own ballot system from the ground up. That matters for one practical reason: the page layout and the nomination form at bismarcktribune.secondstreetapp.com will look familiar to anyone who has entered a similar ballot hosted by a different paper on the same vendor.

What isn't confirmed is whether Bismarck Tribune's specific ballot follows a strict nominate-then-vote structure the way some SecondStreet contests run elsewhere. Nominations for the 2025 cycle stayed open through June 25, a date confirmed on the Tribune's own Facebook page rather than a dedicated rules page. Whatever comes after that window, a finalist round, a straight tally, or something else, hasn't turned up in anything checked for this guide. Read the live bismarcktribune.secondstreetapp.com page for the current cycle's actual stage rather than assume last year's calendar repeats exactly.

None of that changes what a legitimate campaign looks like once a nomination is live. Award-style vote campaigns covers the general shape of pacing reminders through a readers-choice window, useful groundwork whichever of Bismarck's two ballots a business is actually running on.

The one hard record this ballot actually has

A full winners PDF. That's the single most concrete thing on record for Bismarck Tribune's Best of the Best, and it's worth sitting with for a second, because it's more than the crosstown alternative currently offers.

What that PDF does and doesn't prove

Lee Enterprises published a complete winners document for the 2024 cycle. Which specific businesses or categories that PDF names isn't part of what's confirmed for this guide, so no winner name gets repeated here secondhand. What is worth stating plainly: a newspaper that publishes a full results document, rather than nothing, gives a 2024 winner something durable to cite, a dated PDF instead of a screenshot or a half-remembered Facebook post.

A business chasing that second column has one dependable move: open bismarcktribune.secondstreetapp.com directly, or search for the current year's winners document, rather than borrow a category label from a different Lee Enterprises paper's ballot.

Who actually runs the backend behind North Dakota's Best-of ballots

Three organizers, at least two platforms, one state. The Bismarck Tribune runs SecondStreet. Grand Forks runs a similar SecondStreet setup for its own Best of the Best, but under Forum Communications, an entirely separate company from Lee Enterprises despite the shared vendor. Metroland Media, meanwhile, runs its own CommunityVotes platform, live in both Bismarck and Fargo.

None of that overlap means shared results. A SecondStreet ballot in Bismarck and a SecondStreet ballot in Grand Forks stay two separate contests with two separate winner lists, run by two separate newspaper companies that happen to have licensed the same third-party software. A business that wins its category on one has won nothing on the other, even where the voting screen looks nearly identical.

For a Bismarck business weighing which local ballot deserves the bulk of its outreach, that platform detail matters less than the organizer's actual record. Lee Enterprises has, at minimum, published one full results PDF. CommunityVotes Bismarck hasn't, at least not anywhere that turned up for this guide.

Building a Bismarck campaign that survives a fact-check

Mandan sits directly across the Missouri River from downtown Bismarck, close enough that plenty of Bismarck storefronts count Mandan regulars among their everyday customers. Lincoln, Burleigh County, and Morton County round out the wider trade area a Bismarck Tribune Best of the Best nomination realistically draws from. None of that geography changes because this particular ballot happens to run on SecondStreet instead of CommunityVotes' own system.

A real campaign here looks the same as it would on any legitimate readers-choice ballot: ask actual customers to nominate the business by its exact name at bismarcktribune.secondstreetapp.com, then repeat the reminder as the window moves toward whatever date replaces this year's June 25 close. Fabricated accounts, bot traffic, or a sponsorship claim nobody made risk a pulled nomination. Bismarck is small enough that an inflated claim gets noticed around the same handful of downtown blocks it was meant to impress.

Precision protects a business more than enthusiasm does. "Nominated for Bismarck Tribune's Best of the Best" is accurate the day a real nomination goes in. "Winner" only becomes accurate once that year's PDF, or whatever results page follows it, actually says so. A business running both this ballot and CommunityVotes Bismarck in the same year owes each one its own separate claim, not one blended pitch. How online contest votes work covers the broader mechanics behind a push like this, and is buying votes legal is worth reading before committing budget to either ballot.