Watertown Public Opinion Public Opinion-Aberdeen News AOTW Poll: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes in the AOTW Poll and what they are voting on

The Public Opinion-Aberdeen News AOTW Poll is an Athlete of the Week reader vote published by the Watertown Public Opinion, the daily newspaper of Watertown, South Dakota, under the joint masthead Watertown Public Opinion-Aberdeen News that also serves Aberdeen News readers. Each week during the sports season the paper nominates a short slate of high-school athletes and asks its audience to pick a winner. The ballot lives on Crowdsignal (poll.fm), a general-purpose polling platform, at poll.fm/17124807, which currently holds the latest confirmed round of the series.

The audience is the paper's own readership: families, classmates and sports followers in Watertown, Aberdeen and the smaller communities that feed the coverage area. The June 8-14 ballot shows how wide that map runs, listing candidates from Bristol, Redfield, Clear Lake, Wentworth, Volga and Pierpont, towns scattered across northeastern South Dakota. A weekly ballot like this gives a small town's student section a reason to rally, because the winner is decided entirely by click count and the result is printed in the paper's follow-up coverage.

Quick facts

The dated weekly record for this Athlete of the Week series

Confirmed edition years for the series are 2023, 2025 and 2026, which is what qualifies it as a recurring annual program. Within a year the rhythm is weekly: the 2026 season's published trail begins with a winner announced for the March 30-April 5 round and continues through spring, with voting in that stretch running through midnight on Sunday, April 19, 2026. The most recent confirmed ballot covers June 8-14 and is marked closed on poll.fm.

That closed June 8-14 ballot also preserves the numbers. The leading entry finished with 77 percent of the vote, 10,011 votes in total. The runner-up took 15 percent, or 1,960 votes, and a third candidate drew 4 percent, 541 votes. Those figures come straight from the tally Crowdsignal displayed after the close, and they give a sense of scale: a winning push in this series means thousands of clicks concentrated into a few days.

The newspaper has not posted the opening date of the next weekly round; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. That is the standing condition for a series like this, where every week replaces the previous ballot at the same platform. Weekday-by-weekday schedules, and any stretch of the season after the June rounds, are simply not on the published page.

How a supporter actually votes in a weekly AOTW round

Casting a ballot here takes almost no effort. A supporter opens the current poll.fm ballot, reads the slate of Athlete of the Week candidates, each listed by name and home community, clicks the radio button next to the favored athlete, and submits. Crowdsignal registers the click against the running tally. When the round ends, the ballot flips to a closed state and displays the final percentages, as it did for June 8-14.

What the ballot does not publish is any rules text. There is no statement on the page about how many times a supporter may click in a round, no daily return requirement, and no written eligibility policy for nominees. The page carries no published daily vote rule, so anybody hoping to return and click again has nothing in writing to tell them whether repeat submissions are counted or filtered by the platform.

Practically, that leaves persuasion rather than repetition as the reliable play. Because the slate is community-tagged, a nominee's strongest asset is the hometown network: the school's own students, parents and local pages that can be pointed at the poll.fm link while the round is live. The window is short by design, a few days per round, so timing matters more than volume spread across the week.

How this weekly athlete ballot sits beside South Dakota's other reader votes

South Dakota has a busy public-vote scene, but nearly all of it is a different shape from this series. The big annual ballots are best-of programs: 605 Magazine Best of South Dakota, Best of Mitchell, CommunityVotes Rapid City and CommunityVotes Sioux Falls, plus the Rapid City Journal's pair of Best of the Black Hills and Readers' Choice ballots. Those ask readers to choose businesses and services across many categories, once a year.

The AOTW Poll is narrower and faster. It votes on people, not businesses, it runs every week instead of once a season, and its ballot is a single slate rather than a long category list. That changes the campaign math for anybody supporting an entry: instead of a months-long push against a whole field of local shops, a supporter is racing a few days against a handful of athletes from neighboring towns. The newspaper masthead behind it also gives the win a printed, bylined payoff that a business best-of does not.

For readers weighing paid support in any of these ballots, the same caution applies everywhere: read the organizer's rules first, and see award vote services for how purchased votes fit award-style ballots generally. The organizer's own ballot, whether the Public Opinion's weekly poll or a CommunityVotes market, is always the final word on what is allowed.