cleveland.com Best Linebacker in Northeast Ohio: How Voting Works & How to Win

What is the cleveland.com Best Linebacker in Northeast Ohio poll?

cleveland.com, the Northeast Ohio news operation with roots in The Plain Dealer and publication under Advance Local, puts a recurring summer football argument to its readers: which linebacker stands above the rest of the region's high school defenses. The Best Linebacker in Northeast Ohio ballot runs on Crowdsignal's polling service at poll.fm, where the 2026 question sat at poll.fm/17130730.

A best-of format, not a bracket

The structure is a best-of style fan vote rather than a tournament or a judges' panel. Every reader who reaches the ballot sees the same question, the same nominee lines and the same running tally, and the outcome comes solely from the votes readers cast. cleveland.com frames the poll inside its high school sports desk, alongside watch lists of top players across Northeast Ohio rosters, which hands the ballot a built-in audience of families, teammates and local followers. Three traits set the programme apart for a first-time visitor. The market is regional rather than municipal, pulling nominees from communities across the Northeast Ohio footprint instead of a single city league. The subject is narrow, a single defensive position settled by a single question. And the operator is a major metropolitan newsroom, not a civic association or a radio station, which shapes both the promotion the poll receives and the way results get argued over afterward.

Item	Detail
Program	cleveland.com Best Linebacker in Northeast Ohio
Organizer	cleveland.com (The Plain Dealer / Advance Local)
Ballot service	Crowdsignal at poll.fm
2026 ballot address	https://poll.fm/17130730
Market	Northeast Ohio, Ohio
Format	Single-question public fan vote
Season	Summer, June through August

When does the cleveland.com linebacker poll run, and which editions are confirmed?

Dated anchors for this series come from the edition trail and the close of the newest ballot. Recorded editions of the annual summer cycle sit in 2023, 2025 and 2026. For the 2026 edition, cleveland.com's companion coverage set the deadline plainly: "The poll will be open until 10 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 20." The same coverage placed the vote inside the outlet's broader preseason project, noting that "Linebackers are up next in cleveland.com's watch lists of the top high school football players in Northeast Ohio." Placement follows the front edge of the high school football calendar. The cycle spans June through August, so the linebacker question goes live while practices and early games are still forming opinions about who dominates at the position. Votes are cast before a full season of games has accumulated, which colours how the standings should be read.

Stage	Window	Notes
Edition trail	2023, 2025, 2026	summer cycles recorded for the series
Season span	June through August	window the ballot occupies each cycle
2026 close	10 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 20	deadline printed in cleveland.com's coverage
Next cycle	2027	expected return on the observed rhythm

Scope is the main open question around the franchise. Beyond the linebacker question itself, cleveland.com prints no standing catalogue of poll categories attached to this series; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How does voting work on the Northeast Ohio linebacker ballot?

Casting a vote

Taking part asks little of the reader. The linebacker ballot presents the question with a stacked list of nominees, each line pairing a nominee with a member school, and marking a selection followed by the vote control registers the choice on that page. While the poll ran, and after it closed, the same page displayed each line's share of the vote and its raw total, so standings stayed visible without ever leaving the ballot. The 2026 page now wears a closed marker in its title, telling latecomers the tally is final.

Where the nominees come from

The 2026 nominee board reached across the region's high school programmes. Communities with nominees on the list included Riverside, Perry, Hudson, Strongsville, Lorain and Streetsboro, with Avon Lake, Glenville, Olmsted Falls, St. Edward, Villa Angela-St. Joseph and Cuyahoga Valley Christian Academy also carrying lines, joined by other Northeast Ohio towns cleveland.com folded into the same question. The board ran long enough that the ballot carried more nominee lines than a reader might expect from a single-position vote.

Standings from the 2026 ballot

Finish	Share	Votes
Leading nominee	45%	283
Runner-up	33%	206
Third place	17%	-

Rules are the thin spot for planning. The ballot and its companion coverage stop short of an eligibility statement for who may take part, leaving supporter campaigns without written ground rules to point to.

How does this ballot sit beside other Ohio fan votes?

Ohio's fan-vote map gives this ballot several nearby points of comparison, and the differences are sharper than the similarities. The Akron Community's Choice Awards gather reader picks across broad categories of local life, while the Best in Ohio Business Awards and the statewide Best of Ohio programme aim at merchants and services rather than athletes. Media and radio formats occupy a different corner again. 97.1 The Fan Pizza Madness Columbus turns a food debate into a station-driven bracket, and CBUS Top Picks Community Choice Awards together with Best of Cincinnati run citywide, multi-category ballots for their metros. Against that backdrop, the cleveland.com linebacker poll is unusually narrow and unusually seasonal. It names a single position on a single side of the ball, draws its nominees from high school rosters across one region, and lives inside a June-through-August window tied to the football calendar. Where the media awards reward businesses with year-round storefronts, this ballot rewards a young athlete for a few weeks each summer and then resets. That combination of a metro newsroom promoter, a defensive-position question and a summer clock is what separates it from every neighbour on the list.

How can support for a nominee be strengthened in this poll?

Support in this poll concentrates inside a short stretch, so timing outweighs volume. A campaign that rallies a school community during the June-through-August window matches the way the ballot actually runs, while effort spent outside that stretch lands nowhere. In 2026 that stretch ran to its printed deadline, so outreach built around the closing weeks of summer carried the most weight. Sharing the ballot link through team families, booster groups and local followers fits how cleveland.com frames the vote, as a readership debate over the region's top linebacker. On outside help, the organizer stays silent in writing: no published statement covers purchased or coordinated voting for this series. Readers weighing assistance can start with how supporters grow vote totals, then check the legal position on paying for poll votes before spending anything. Pages covering votes for best-of award ballots describe the market for formats shaped like this one. Whatever route a campaign takes, no vote-purchasing service can promise where a nominee finishes in a public tally.