2025 Go! Eastern Oregon Readers' Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

A Pendleton business staring at a closed ballot

If you run a shop, restaurant or service business in the East Oregonian's coverage area, the problem this page solves is simple: the 2025 Go! Eastern Oregon Readers' Choice Awards ballot is closed, and you need to know what actually happened in that cycle and what to do about the next one. The East Oregonian, the newspaper headquartered in Pendleton, Oregon, runs the program as its best-of vertical, and carries the vote on Second Street, the contest platform that hosts the paper's other reader promotions.

The 2025 cycle folded nomination and voting into a single ballot. That structure matters to a business owner because it means supporters could write in a favorite local business before a shortlist existed, and the voting stage was listed separately from March 4, 2026 to the May 1, 2026 close. A business that mobilized customers early in the window had a longer runway than one that waited for the voting stage alone.

What the listing does not tell you is which categories ran and how often one supporter could vote. The East Oregonian has not published a category roster with the material held for this page, and no per-supporter rule appears alongside it; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. That gap is exactly why planning for the next edition should start from the live form, not from assumptions carried over from another town's contest.

The dated history: three editions and one long window

Three editions of the Go! Eastern Oregon Readers' Choice Awards are confirmed: 2024, 2025 and 2026. The 2024 edition ran under its own Second Street address, opening December 11, 2025 and closing February 1, 2026. The 2025 edition followed at the same host, with its combined nomination-and-voting ballot running from December 11, 2025 through May 1, 2026. The 2026 edition is confirmed as a year on the program's history, and a next cycle would be the program's fourth consecutive edition.

Two details in that history are worth a business owner's attention. First, the 2025 window was long, close to five months from open to close, which is unusual among readers' choice ballots and gave nominating businesses an extended stretch to gather support. Second, the voting stage was listed from March 4, 2026, meaning the earliest weeks of the window were effectively the nomination stretch where write-ins carried the most weight.

The paper has not announced the open date for the next edition. Its Second Street host also carries a 2026 Q4 sweepstakes running November 2 through December 9, 2026, which shows the host stays active between readers' choice cycles but says nothing about when the awards return. The reliable move is to check the paper's contest page and the Second Street host directly as the next cycle approaches, since the East Oregonian posts each edition's window on the live ballot when it opens.

How a supporter votes on this ballot today

The mechanic on this ballot is a standard Second Street public vote with a nomination stage folded in. A supporter opens the ballot at eastoregonian.secondstreetapp.com, signs in or registers with an email address, and then either writes in a favorite business during the nomination stretch or selects from the field once nominations have produced one. Each pick is submitted through the form, and the form confirms it on screen.

Because the 2025 edition was typed as a nomination-and-voting ballot, the supporter's first meaningful action was the write-in. In the 2025 cycle that stretch ran from the December 11, 2025 open until the voting stage was listed on March 4, 2026. After that point the ballot behaved like a conventional readers' choice vote against the nominated field, through the May 1, 2026 close.

Two practical notes for supporters. The ballot is free; nothing in the East Oregonian's published material charges for voting, and paidVoting is not part of the program. And the frequency rule is not printed anywhere alongside the listing, so a supporter who wants to return on multiple days should read the rules block on the live form rather than assume a daily reset. Second Street enforces whatever cap the publisher configures, which means the form itself is the authority on how often one person may participate in a given cycle.

Where this ballot sits among Oregon's readers' choice programs

Eastern Oregon's readers' choice ballot is one of several best-of programs across the state, and it is the only one anchored to the East Oregonian's Pendleton-based coverage area. The nearest comparisons on this site are all west or north of the region: the Bend Magazine Readers' Choice Awards in Bend, the Best of Eugene and Eugene Community's Choice Awards in the southern Willamette Valley, the Best of the Mid-Valley Community's Choice Awards, the Best of Portland metro ballot, and the Coast Weekend Readers' Choice Awards serving Astoria.

What distinguishes the Go! Eastern Oregon program is its market shape and its calendar. It serves a newspaper coverage area rather than a single city limit, and its 2025 window stretched from December into May, longer than the compressed spring windows many readers' choice ballots run. For a business in Pendleton or the surrounding towns, that means the local competitive field is smaller and the runway to gather support is wider than in the state's metro ballots.

Each program answers to a separate publisher under separate rules, so a strategy that fits Portland's ballot does not transfer automatically. The East Oregonian's rules, categories and vote limits live on its own Second Street form, and reading them there is the only step that applies to this specific ballot.

Strengthening support in this ballot, within the paper's rules

For a business planning its next Go! Eastern Oregon push, the facts above point to three moves. Start early: the 2025 nomination stretch ran from the December 11 open, so businesses that asked customers to write them in during December and January had months of runway before the voting stage was even listed on March 4. Ask in person: a counter sign, a receipt insert and a staff script reach the Pendleton customers most likely to follow through. And keep the ask honest: the East Oregonian has not published its stance on outside vote support alongside the listing, so the paper's own contest terms on the live ballot are the only authority on what is allowed.

General outreach tactics that work on newspaper ballots are covered in our votes guide, and the service-side questions are answered at buy award votes. Winning any readers' choice ballot is never a guaranteed outcome, whatever support route a business takes.