Archive Wapo Skins Poll Surprising Not Shocking: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the ICT Skins Poll page is, and who stands behind it

Most ballots in this directory's South Dakota section are reader's-choice contests: 605 Magazine Best of South Dakota, Best of Mitchell and the CommunityVotes pair all invite readers to name their favorite local businesses. The Archive Wapo Skins Poll Surprising Not Shocking page is a different animal entirely. It is an article in the archive of Indian Country Today, an Indigenous newspaper registered to South Dakota that publishes at its own domain, ictnews.org, and describes itself as reporting on Indian Country since 1981.

The headline is WaPo Skins Poll: Surprising, Not Shocking, and the byline belongs to Harlan McKosato. The piece reacts to a Washington Post survey, published the week before the article, in which nine out of 10 Native Americans surveyed did not find the term Redsk*ns offensive. McKosato writes that the finding drew outrage from Indians all over the internet, and from tribal leaders and scholars who had been leading the charge for changing the Washington NFL football team's nickname.

The page carries a public-vote mechanic rather than a commercial contest platform, and the vertical here is best-of in the loosest sense: a single opinion piece with a vote attached, not a multi-category ballot. The table below collects the essentials.

The dated record: editions, the November window, and what is missing

Two edition years are attached to this program, 2025 and 2026, and that pair is what earns it the annual label here. The article itself carries two dates of its own: May 28, 2016 as the original publication, and November 28, 2025 as the republication stamp visible in the page's share line. The 2026 copyright footer on ictnews.org, reading ICT Powered by Newspack, shows the newsroom behind the page is still publishing.

The confirmed voting window falls in November 2025, with the month carrying the voting phase from the first to the last of the month. That month-level window is what the page supports; the exact open and close days, the list of ballot categories, any limit on repeat voting, and any platform round dates are all absent from the material behind this page, so confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

That gap matters more here than on a typical contest page, because this is an archive item rather than a live ballot portal. A reader arriving from search lands on a 2016 article that was republished in November 2025, and the page's own framing, "You found something we published a while back," says exactly that. The vote element and the archive framing sit side by side, so the dates a supporter needs are the ones the live page prints, not the ones the article's history implies.

How a supporter votes on the ICT page today

The literal mechanic is a public vote carried on ictnews.org itself. A supporter opens the WaPo Skins Poll: Surprising, Not Shocking page, reads the article, and registers a choice through the vote element on the page. No purchase is involved, and the navigation includes a Donate button and a Sign In link, but whether the vote itself requires an account is not stated in the material behind this summary.

Because the ballot lives inside a news article, the supporter journey looks different from a reader's-choice contest. There is no nomination round to work through and no category menu to browse; the page is one article with one vote attached. The share line at the top of the article, with its Facebook share option, is the practical tool for a supporter who wants other readers to reach the same vote.

Timing is the one part a supporter cannot read off this summary. The confirmed window ran through November 2025, and the republication date of November 28, 2025 falls inside that month, but no hour-by-hour schedule is printed on the page. Anyone planning a coordinated push should open the live page, read whatever dates and rules it shows that day, and work from those rather than from assumptions carried over from other South Dakota ballots.

How this ballot sits beside its South Dakota neighbours

South Dakota's public-vote lineup in this directory is dominated by local reader's-choice programs: CommunityVotes Rapid City, CommunityVotes Sioux Falls, Rapid City Journal Best of the Black Hills and Rapid City Journal Readers' Choice. Each of those is built around business categories, a nomination round and a local audience, with a separate publisher behind each one.

The ICT page differs on every one of those axes. Its organizer is a national Indigenous newsroom rather than a local publisher, its subject is a Washington NFL nickname debate rather than local businesses, and its home is an archive article rather than a contest portal. A vote cast here is a statement about the Redsk*ns survey debate, not a recommendation of a restaurant or a mechanic, and the audience is readers of Indigenous news across the country rather than one South Dakota city.

What this means in practice is that advice written for the reader's-choice ballots does not transfer. Those programs reward showing up daily across a category list; this page rewards reaching the readers who already care about the topic. Anyone comparing the two should read each program's own page, starting with the ICT ballot and then the sibling routes above, because the rules, the windows and the mechanics are set separately by each organizer.

Strengthening support on a ballot that lives inside a news article

On a reader's-choice ballot, support usually means repeated daily voting across categories. On this page the mechanic is a single public vote attached to one article, so the work is different: reach the readers for whom the Washington NFL nickname debate already matters. The article's own share buttons, pointed at Facebook, are the built-in route, and the piece's subject matter gives it a natural audience among tribal communities and Indigenous news readers.

Indian Country Today has put no rulebook in print for this archive page, so there is no published statement about outside help, vote software or bulk voting to quote. That silence cuts both ways: nothing permits it, and nothing forbids it in writing. The honest position is that the page's terms, whatever they are, govern, and a supporter should read the live page before assuming any tactic is welcome.

What can be said plainly is that the page rewards distribution, not repetition. Sharing the Harlan McKosato article with communities that followed the Redsk*ns debate, and letting readers reach the vote themselves, matches the way this ballot is actually built. For broader tactics that apply across public votes, see our guide to getting more votes online, and weigh any paid option against what the live page actually allows.