Best of Rogue Valley Community Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

A community choice ballot with no single town attached

"Community Choice Awards" ballots hand the decision to an outlet's own readers instead of a judging panel, and Rogue Valley Times structures the 2026 CCA - Best of Rogue Valley the same way: readers themselves supply both the nominations and the votes, through one combined Second Street ballot. What stands out about this particular listing is what it doesn't attach itself to: no single town, no county, just Oregon, the state where Rogue Valley Times publishes.

Treat the blank rows plainly rather than filling them in with a guess. A ballot two editions into its own history hasn't yet shown whether its June opening date holds steady year to year; confirm on the live ballot each cycle before planning around it.

Two confirmed editions, both closing in late summer

The current cycle's window opened June 1, 2026 and closed August 1. Archived evidence points to an earlier edition too, with its own opening landing around April 16, 2025, though the organizer hasn't published that first edition's own closing date the way it has for 2026. Two editions is what's confirmed, no more and no fewer.

Nothing published projects forward past the 2026 close. A supporter hoping to plan around a third edition has no confirmed date to work from yet, and inventing one would outrun what Rogue Valley Times has actually said.

One structural detail is worth flagging for anyone used to a two-step readers'-choice format: this listing doesn't split off a separate nominating window that closes before voting begins. A supporter arrives, suggests a name, and votes on the spot, all inside the same open window rather than across two scheduled stages. Whether Rogue Valley Times keeps that one-step design for a third edition remains an open question; only roguevalleytimes.secondstreetapp.com will settle it once a new listing appears.

One newspaper's several Oregon ballots, and how far apart they sit

Rogue Valley Times isn't the only Oregon publisher running a readers'-vote program, and the CCA ballot shares no judging panel and no combined tally with any of the six below.

A strong showing in the Rogue Valley Times ballot buys nothing toward any of the six others; each keeps its own rulebook and its own results. Someone entering more than one program at once is running separate campaigns side by side, not one combined effort, and none of the six share Rogue Valley Times' own subdomain or its own organizer, so results on one carry no automatic weight on another.

Building support without a decade of past editions to study

Two confirmed editions means a supporter can't lean on years of past results to guess how this ballot behaves. The steadier approach is asking people who'd genuinely want to weigh in, readers who already follow Rogue Valley Times, to visit roguevalleytimes.secondstreetapp.com directly and cast one real vote, then reaching out again before a window closes rather than relying on a single message.

Rogue Valley Times hasn't said what it does about padded or automated activity on this particular ballot, and getting that guess wrong matters more for a program still on its second edition than it would for one with a long publishing history behind it. Two pages worth a look before spending real effort on a future round: is buying votes legal sorts ordinary reader encouragement from riskier tactics, while award-vote campaign planning walks through how a nominate-and-vote structure similar to this one typically gets approached. Buying votes online fills in what paid outreach for a public ballot usually looks like in practice.