Best Cultural Festival: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes and why the Dublin Irish Festival campaign matters

The Best Cultural Festival recognition is a readers' choice award, which means the people who decide it are ordinary supporters rather than a judging panel. The program behind it is the USA TODAY 10Best Readers' Choice Awards, and the nominee on the Ohio side is the Dublin Irish Festival, an annual celebration of Irish music, culture and dance held in Dublin, Ohio. The festival's own website carries the award announcement, which makes the festival's audience the natural voting base: season ticket holders, volunteers, performers, and the wider Irish-American community that fills the festival grounds every August.

That community shape matters for anyone trying to understand how this ballot works. A readers' choice award is won by whichever nominee can turn enthusiasm into completed ballots during the voting round. The Dublin Irish Festival has already shown it can do that, holding the No. 1 ranking in the 2025 cycle. Its announcement of the honor is published on the same domain that promotes the vote, so supporters who want to help have a single, official starting point.

The ballot sits in the best-of vertical, alongside other Ohio readers' choice programs such as Best of Ohio and the CBUS Top Picks Community Choice Awards. What separates this one is scale and identity: it is a national 10Best category where an Ohio festival competes against cultural events from across the country, and the voting base is not limited to central Ohio. Anyone who loves the festival, or simply wants an Ohio event to win a national title, can participate in the round while it is open.

The dated history of this award cycle

The confirmed history for this program covers three award cycles: 2024, 2025 and 2026. The festival's announcement describes the celebration as annual and states that it previously earned the No. 1 ranking in 2025, which anchors the most recent honor to a specific year. The festival itself is a long-running August tradition, with its own materials reserving the first weekend in August for the event since 1988, making it a three-day celebration that has grown into one of the largest of its kind.

The next festival weekend is dated on the festival's site: August 6-8, 2027, in Dublin, Ohio. That weekend is the event the award recognition attaches to, and it is the anchor date supporters will see when they visit the festival's award page. The voting round for the 10Best category follows the USA TODAY 10Best calendar, which is separate from the festival weekend itself.

What the festival's award page does not print is the fine print of the ballot: the precise start and finish dates for the current 10Best round, whether one supporter may vote more than once, and who may take part. Those details live on the 10Best ballot for the year in question, so confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The festival's page also does not list the full slate of 10Best categories, since it speaks only to the cultural festival recognition the festival itself earned.

For supporters tracking the calendar, the practical rhythm is simple: the award cycle lands in the months around the festival's annual August weekend, the festival promotes the ballot from its own announcement page, and the 10Best program handles the tallying. Everything dated beyond the 2027 festival weekend comes from the 10Best calendar rather than from the festival.

How a supporter casts a vote today

Voting happens through a straightforward public ballot run by the USA TODAY 10Best Readers' Choice Awards. A supporter who wants to back the Dublin Irish Festival starts at the festival's own award announcement page, which is published on dublinirishfestival.org and carries the recognition news along with the route to the ballot. From that page the supporter follows the link into the 10Best voting round for the cultural festival category.

Once on the 10Best ballot, the supporter finds the Dublin Irish Festival among the nominated cultural festivals and submits a vote for it. No purchase is involved in the ballot itself, and no festival ticket is required to participate in the readers' choice round. The vote is cast during whatever window the 10Best program has opened for the current cycle, which is why the festival's page is the dependable entry point: it is refreshed whenever a new round begins.

Because the ballot is hosted by the 10Best program rather than by the festival, the operational details are the 10Best program's to publish. Whether the ballot asks for an email, whether it limits repeat votes, and whether it verifies supporters are questions the ballot itself answers when the round is live. The festival's announcement page does not restate those rules, so a supporter with a specific question about the voting form should read the prompts on the ballot at the moment of voting.

Supporters who want a broader picture of how Ohio public ballots work can compare this one with the Akron Community's Choice Awards, which runs on a different organizer's calendar, or with the Best in Ohio Business Awards. Each program sets its own voting rules, so the mechanics that apply to the 10Best ballot do not transfer to those pages.

How this ballot sits beside its Ohio neighbours

Ohio readers' choice voting splits into two families. One family is local and regional: publications and chambers run ballots that rank businesses and events inside a single city or across the state. The Best of Cincinnati ballot and the 97.1 The Fan Pizza Madness Columbus bracket both belong to that family, each run by a separate publisher on a separate annual schedule.

The Best Cultural Festival recognition sits in the other family: a national category where an Ohio nominee competes nationally. The organizer is the USA TODAY 10Best Readers' Choice Awards, and the nominee is the Dublin Irish Festival in Dublin, Ohio. That difference changes who votes. A city ballot draws mostly local supporters; a 10Best category draws festival fans, Irish cultural organizations and readers from anywhere the program reaches, which is how a three-day Ohio festival can finish at the top of a national field, as it did with the No. 1 ranking in 2025.

The practical upshot for supporters is that momentum for this ballot travels further than one metro area. A vote cast from another state counts toward the same national category, so the festival's diaspora audience and cultural partners outside Ohio are part of the voting base in a way that local ballots rarely see. The festival's own award page is built for exactly that audience, since it announces the recognition and points every reader, local or not, toward the same ballot.

Anyone comparing Ohio programs should also note the calendar difference. The 10Best cycle is set nationally, while the festival weekend itself is fixed for August 6-8, 2027. The two calendars meet on the festival's announcement page, which is updated whenever a new recognition cycle begins.

Strengthening support for the Dublin Irish Festival ballot

Support for this ballot starts with the festival's own award page on dublinirishfestival.org, because that page names the recognition and routes readers into the live 10Best round. Sharing that page, rather than a search result, is the single most effective step a supporter can take: everyone who arrives through it lands on the correct ballot for the current cycle.

The voting base here is unusually wide for an Ohio nominee. Festival fans, performers, volunteers, Irish cultural groups and readers of the 10Best program outside the state can all participate, so a share that reaches beyond central Ohio travels further than it would on a city-only ballot. Community groups and cultural organizations that already promote the festival each August are natural messengers during the voting round as well.

Regarding outside help, the festival's award page states no policy on purchased or automated votes, and the 10Best program's own rules govern the ballot. Anyone weighing paid support should read what the service page at buying award votes explains about award ballots generally, and should weigh it against the terms shown on the live 10Best form before spending anything. A readers' choice ballot is one thing; winning it is a separate thing no outside provider can promise.