Readers' Choice 2026 (The Morning Call): How Voting Works & How to Win

What Readers' Choice 2026 is and who runs it

Readers' Choice 2026 is the annual best-of ballot The Morning Call runs for its readers. The organizer, The Morning Call, is the Allentown, Pennsylvania newspaper whose headquarters sit in that city, and it frames the program as its annual reader-selected best-of for Lehigh Valley businesses. The vertical is a classic best-of: nominated local businesses, readers voting for the ones they rate highest, and a published window during which those votes count.

The platform is Second Street, the ballot and contest vendor whose app domain carries the Morning Call's voting programs. The paper's Athlete of the Week and Game of the Week polls sit on the same organization page, so a reader who has voted in one Morning Call poll has already used the same ballot software. The 2026 ballot lives at mcall.secondstreetapp.com/Readers-Choice-2026.

Facts at a glance

Set beside its siblings, this is the newspaper ballot of the Lehigh Valley's dominant daily paper, which is what separates it from magazine programs elsewhere in Pennsylvania.

The dated history of the Morning Call's readers poll

Nine edition years are confirmed for the program: 2018, 2019 and 2020, then 2021, 2022 and 2023, then 2024, 2025 and 2026. Those years come from the ballot addresses Second Street has carried for the Morning Call year by year, each edition sitting at the same domain under its own year path. Nine consecutive rounds mark this as one of the longer-running readers polls among the Pennsylvania programs covered on this site.

The 2026 edition ran July 12 through August 17, 2026, per the platform dates for The Morning Call. That midsummer window is when the 2026 round was live, and it is the single most useful dated fact for a supporter deciding whether the ballot is open. The 2026 page has since closed, so votes submitted now belong to no edition until the organizer posts the next one.

What the organizer has not put on the published ballot material is the category roster for the 2026 round, nor the terms covering who may take part or how a supporter's total is limited across the whole poll; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Those gaps are worth naming plainly, because a business owner planning a push needs the roster, and the ballot page is where it appears when the round opens.

How a supporter votes on the 2026 ballot

Voting on this Morning Call ballot is a plain public vote on a Second Street form. A supporter opens the 2026 ballot, moves through the categories the current round carries, selects a business in each group, and submits. No account requirement or payment step is part of anything the published material states; the form itself, when the round is live, is what settles how the vote is logged.

The ballot's own text set the per-category limit during 2026: "You can vote once per category until Sunday, August 9th 2026 at 11:59pm Eastern Time." Read carefully, that rule gives a supporter one vote in every category rather than a single vote across the entire poll, which is the detail most often misread on best-of ballots. The closing time in that sentence is Eastern Time, matching the Allentown audience the paper serves.

Because the 2026 round has closed, the literal sequence a supporter follows today is the one that will apply when the next edition appears: same domain, same year-path pattern, new dates printed on the new page. A reader who wants to be first in line when voting reopens can check the Morning Call's organization page on Second Street, where the paper's polls, including its Athlete of the Week ballot, appear as they go live.

Where this ballot sits among its Pennsylvania neighbours

Pennsylvania carries a dense field of best-of programs, and the Morning Call's readers poll has a distinct place in it. Best of Philly is Philadelphia Magazine's program for that city. Best of the 'Burgh covers Pittsburgh. Best of Berks is the Berks County Living Magazine ballot. Best of the Lehigh Valley is Lehigh Valley Style's program, which shares the Morning Call's region but answers to a different publisher. Bucks County & Chester County Readers' Choice and Erie Reader Best of Erie round out the sibling set to the east and northwest.

Against that field, the Morning Call ballot is the only one in the set run by a Lehigh Valley daily newspaper on Second Street, with editions stretching unbroken from 2018 through 2026. Lehigh Valley Style's ballot is its closest geographic neighbour, and a business weighing both should treat them as separate contests with separate windows, separate category rosters and separate vote rules, since neither organizer's result carries over to the other.

The contrast matters for strategy too. A nine-year run means returning winners and returning voters, so a first-time nominee in the Morning Call poll is competing against businesses whose customers already know the drill. That history is also why the Allentown paper's program is cited so often as the benchmark for what a mature regional readers poll looks like in Pennsylvania.

Strengthening support in the Morning Call's poll

Support in this ballot is built on the once-per-category rule. Because the ballot's published text gave each supporter one vote per category, the strongest legitimate push is breadth: ask every customer, in person and by email, to vote for the business in every category it appears in, not just the most obvious one. A business whose patrons each fill in several categories gains more from the same number of supporters than one that only campaigns in a single group.

Timing matters against the July-to-August window. The 2026 round stayed open a little over a month, so a business that starts asking in the first week gets its whole customer base through the ballot before the close, while a late start spends the window chasing. The Morning Call has not published what outside help it tolerates beyond its vote limit, so any organized effort should stay inside the published rule rather than test it.

For a fuller playbook, see how to get more votes online, which covers campaign tactics that fit a once-per-category ballot, and the pricing page if a comparison with paid vote packages is what a reader is after. No package changes the organizer's own limit; only the ballot's rule decides what counts.