Readers' Choice Awards 2025: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes and why this Lancaster ballot exists

The Readers' Choice Awards 2025 is a best-of ballot that LNP Media Group, Inc. puts before the public. LNP is the media company headquartered at 101 North Queen Street in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Its audience is the readership of the local paper: people who live, shop and spend in the Lancaster market and are asked each cycle to name the local businesses, restaurants and service providers they consider the best at what they do. That community-first design is what separates a readers' choice program from a sweepstakes. Nothing is won by chance; a nominee wins because enough real supporters took the trouble to vote.

Second Street carries the ballot, the promotion platform whose account at lnpmediagroup.secondstreetapp.com also carries LNP's other reader promotions, from quarterly sweepstakes to the Lancaster City Window Decorating Contest. The 2025 edition sits at lnpmediagroup.secondstreetapp.com/Readers-Choice-Awards-2025.

Facts at a glance

For a supporter, the meaning of the program is straightforward. A nomination here is a public endorsement by the local paper's audience, and the businesses that finish on top can point to a result produced by their own customers rather than by a judging panel.

The dated record: editions, windows and what is not published

The program's recent history is well anchored. Confirmed editions ran in 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025, each with its own ballot address on the LNP Media Group Second Street account, such as Readers-Choice-Awards-2024-2 for the 2024 cycle and Readers-Choice-Awards-2021 for the first of those years. The organizer itself describes the Readers' Choice Awards as a hugely popular annual program it has run for the past twenty years, and a Pennsylvania newsmedia publication dates the launch to 2014, when readers chose their favorites through Second Street.

No fact on the page is dated more tightly than the 2025 window. The ballot opened on May 5, 2025 and closed on May 31, 2025, a span of under four weeks, and the edition is now closed. Earlier editions also ran in May, with the series' platform dates reaching back to May 16, 2021.

Two things LNP leaves off the ballot page matter to anyone planning a campaign. The 2025 category roster and any per-supporter voting rule are absent from what the organizer publishes there; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. No dates for a 2026 edition have been announced either, so a business that wants to compete should watch the ballot page and the paper itself for the next window rather than assume the May pattern carries forward automatically.

How a supporter votes on the Second Street ballot

Public voting is the whole mechanic, and it is deliberately simple. During an open window, a supporter visits the ballot page, moves through the categories, and selects the nominee they want to back in each one. The form is hosted by Second Street, which handles the collection and tallying of reader choices for LNP. No payment and no purchase of any kind is involved in casting a vote; the ballot is a free reader participation feature of the paper.

What the ballot page leaves unsaid is the fine print around repeat voting. Whether one person may return daily, whether a login is required before the form accepts a choice, and whether there is any ceiling on votes from a single household are all absent from the page LNP publishes for the 2025 edition. The live form itself is the authority: it enforces whatever rule applies at the moment a supporter submits.

Timing matters as much as mechanics. The 2025 window ran from May 5 to May 31, 2025, and the ballot is closed now, so a visit today shows a finished edition rather than an active form. Anyone hoping to join the next cycle should return when LNP announces the new ballot, because a vote cast outside the window has no effect on any result. Businesses that plan ahead usually brief their customers on the exact window before it opens, since a four-week span passes quickly and late reminders reach fewer people.

Where this ballot sits among Pennsylvania's best-of programs

Lancaster is not the only Pennsylvania market with a reader-voted best-of ballot, and the state has a crowded field of them. Philadelphia Magazine runs Best of Philly, Pittsburgh has Best of the 'Burgh, Berks County Living Magazine runs Best of Berks, Lehigh Valley Style runs Best of the Lehigh Valley, the suburban papers run Bucks County & Chester County Readers' Choice, and the Erie Reader runs Best of Erie. Every one of them has a separate publisher behind it, and a result in one program means nothing in the others.

What makes the LNP program distinct within that field is its publisher's local position. LNP Media Group is the daily newspaper for Lancaster, headquartered downtown at 101 North Queen Street, so its readers' choice ballot is tied to a single, compact market rather than a metro region of millions. The same publisher also runs the LNP Lancaster City Window Decorating Contest on the same Second Street account, a seasonal ballot that runs in late November and December, which gives Lancaster readers two distinct public-vote traditions from one publisher: a spring business ballot and a winter holiday one.

For any business weighing where to put its effort, the practical difference is audience overlap. A Lancaster nominee competes for the same local readership here that it would in no other program on this list, which is why the spring window is the one that matters in this market.

Strengthening support during an open window

Because this is a public-vote ballot, a nominee's result tracks the number of real supporters it can mobilize inside the window. The playbook that fits this program is local and direct: tell customers the ballot is open, name the category they should look for, and give them the ballot address. The 2025 window lasted from May 5 to May 31, so reminders sent in the first half of the span reach far more voters than a push in the final days.

On outside help, LNP has not published its rules for the 2025 ballot, so LNP's own rulebook is the only authority on what is permitted, and reading it before any campaign is the sensible first step. General tactics that work across reader ballots, from email lists to social posts to in-store signage, are covered in our guide to getting more votes online, and the legal framing around purchased support is set out at is buying votes legal. Whatever route a business takes, the votes that count are the ones the Second Street form accepts while the window is open.