2026 The Ruthies Community's Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Ruthies are and who runs them

The Ruthies Community's Choice Awards is a readers' choice ballot for the Murfreesboro, Tennessee market, run by the Murfreesboro Daily News Journal. The 2026 edition sits on Second Street, the platform the Daily News Journal uses for its whole contest calendar, and the ballot lives under the paper's dnj.gannettcontests.com domain. The program's vertical is best-of: local businesses, organizations and individuals are nominated and then voted on by the public, which places it in the same broad family as the Times Free Press program in Chattanooga or Cityview Best of the Best (Knoxville), though each of those answers to a different publisher.

What separates the Ruthies inside that family is its two-stage shape. The organizer runs a nomination round first, then opens a voting round for the top companies in each category. That sequence comes from the organizer's own program page for Murfreesboro, which introduces the nomination stage with the line "It all begins with nominations."

The market label attached to the ballot is Murfreesboro, TN, and the state attached to the program is Tennessee. No county is named anywhere in connection with the program, and the ballot is anchored to the Daily News Journal's own readership rather than to a statewide roster of towns.

The promotion type listed on the platform is Ballot/VotingBallot, a plain public vote. That matters on this domain, because several neighbouring promotions run by the same organizer, such as the Get Kalahari'd Away Fall 2026 sweepstakes, are entry drawings rather than votes, and a reader landing on the wrong page could mistake one for the other.

The dated record for the Ruthies, 2023 to 2026

Four editions of the Ruthies are confirmed, spanning 2023 through 2026. Each edition carries its own set of pages on the Daily News Journal's contest domain, including a nomination page and a winners page, and the 2023 ballot also appears under the organizer's secondstreetapp.com address. The program is annual, and the organizer's own coverage of the 2025 edition describes the Ruthies as hosted annually by the Daily News Journal, honoring outstanding local businesses, organizations and individuals based on community nominations and votes.

The 2026 cycle has two dated stages. The nomination round ran May 8-29, 2026. The voting round then ran July 17-31, 2026, and the platform listing for the ballot shows it open through August 1, 2026, with the promotion now closed. Both stages sit inside a span the platform dates from 2023-02-15 through 2026-08-01 across the program's editions, which is why the Ruthies read as a mid-summer ballot rather than a spring one.

Not everything about the cycle is published. The Daily News Journal has not printed the 2026 category roster or any per-supporter voting rule on the ballot page; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. No 2027 dates have been announced either, so the next expected edition is a reasonable inference from the annual pattern, not a posted fact.

For a reader checking a specific year, the winners pages are the fastest route: separate addresses exist for the 2023, 2024 and 2025 results, and the 2026 winners page follows the same naming pattern as its predecessors.

How a supporter votes on the Ruthies ballot

Voting in the Ruthies is a two-step experience spread over the summer. A supporter who wants a particular Murfreesboro business on the final ballot starts during the nomination round, which in 2026 ran May 8-29. Nominations happen on the organizer's own nomination page, a separate address from the voting ballot, and the organizer's copy frames this stage as the true start of the program.

Once nominations close, the top companies in each category move on to the voting round. In 2026 that round ran July 17-31 on the Second Street ballot at dnj.gannettcontests.com. A supporter opens the ballot, works through the categories, and selects the business, organization or individual they want in each one, then submits. The ballot is a Ballot/VotingBallot promotion, so the action is a vote rather than an entry or a purchase.

Two practical details are not stated on the ballot page. Whether the Ruthies require an account or an email to submit a vote is not printed, and neither is any rule about returning on consecutive days. Both behaviors are common on Second Street ballots, but the Daily News Journal has not published its version for this promotion, so the voting screen during a live round is the only authoritative source.

After the round closes, results move to a winners page. The 2026 ballot is closed as of early September 2026, so a supporter arriving now is between cycles: the useful action is watching for the next nomination round, which by the 2026 pattern would be expected in May, though the organizer has not posted 2027 dates.

How the Ruthies sit beside their Tennessee neighbours

Tennessee carries six sibling programs on this site, and the Ruthies differ from every one of them in publisher, platform or shape. The BroadwayWorld Memphis Awards and the BroadwayWorld Nashville Awards belong to a theatre publisher and run in two separate cities; the Ruthies belong to a daily newspaper and anchor a single market, Murfreesboro. CommunityVotes Chattanooga shares the nominate-then-vote rhythm but answers to a different organizer entirely.

The Times Free Press ballot in Chattanooga is the closest structural cousin, since both are newspaper-run best-of programs, but it serves the Chattanooga market rather than Murfreesboro and runs under that paper's own operation. Cityview Best of the Best (Knoxville) is a magazine product in a different media family, and the Knoxville HBA Parade of Homes is a builder-focused program rather than a general readers' choice ballot at all.

Within that set, the Ruthies' distinguishing feature is the explicit two-stage calendar with named dates for both stages: nominations May 8-29, voting July 17-31 in 2026. Several siblings run a single combined round; the Ruthies split them, which gives businesses two separate moments to mobilize supporters and gives voters a shorter, more concentrated voting window in July.

Readers comparing programs should also note the platform split: the Ruthies run on Second Street under a Gannett contest domain, while the 2023 edition additionally appeared on the organizer's secondstreetapp.com address. None of the six siblings shares that exact hosting arrangement, which is one more reason a Ruthies campaign is planned around its own calendar rather than borrowed from another Tennessee ballot.

Strengthening support during a Ruthies round

The Ruthies' short July voting window is the fact that shapes any support campaign. In 2026 the round ran July 17-31, so a business had roughly two weeks to convert customers into voters, after a May nomination stage that already required attention. Campaigns that plan around both dates, rather than discovering the ballot mid-round, start their ask during nominations and keep momentum into July.

The Daily News Journal has posted no rules document for the Ruthies, so there is no stated policy from the organizer on outside help, vote purchasing or automated voting for this ballot. That silence cuts both ways: nothing printed permits it, and nothing printed forbids it, which is why any decision should rest on the live ballot's own terms. Our votes overview explains what purchased participation is in general terms without promising outcomes for this or any ballot.

What is fully within a business's control is ordinary outreach: telling customers the ballot address, naming the categories worth a vote, and reminding them before July 31. Those tactics cost nothing and never touch the organizer's rules, and they are the same fundamentals covered in our guide to earning more votes online, adapted here to a two-stage, mid-summer newspaper ballot.