Daily Post-Athenian Halloween Coloring Contest: How Voting Works & How to Win

A closed 2025 cycle and no confirmed 2026 date: what actually stands right now

September 2026, and the most recent confirmed Halloween Coloring Contest already ended: October 28 through November 3, 2025. No page for a 2026 Halloween edition has surfaced yet, which puts a family checking in today in an odd spot between two cycles rather than mid-contest.

The Daily Post-Athenian organizes this photo-upload vote directly, hosted on the Second Street platform at dailypostathenian.secondstreetapp.com rather than through a shared statewide ballot. Six confirmed editions back the program, 2020 through 2025, each with its own dated page.

Read that last row for what it is: a gap, not a denial. Confirm on the live ballot each cycle, since a six-year pattern still leaves the exact 2026 terms an open question.

One newspaper, four coloring contests: telling this one apart from the rest of 2026

The mix-up risk here is real. Beyond the Halloween program, The Daily Post-Athenian's own 2026 promotion list already shows an Easter Coloring Contest 2026, a MOO Fest Coloring Contest 2026 and a July 4th Coloring Contest 2026, each a separate entry with its own dates on the same Second Street account. A family bookmarking "the coloring contest" without the Halloween name attached could easily land on the wrong one, or on a page for a round that already closed months earlier.

Unlike Knoxville HBA Parade of Homes' business-award format, or the BroadwayWorld theater awards run elsewhere in the state, every one of The Daily Post-Athenian's coloring promotions asks for the same thing: a photo of a finished page, voted on by the public. Only the Halloween-dated page, whenever it reopens, is the one this guide tracks.

The practical fix is bookmarking the exact URL rather than a search result. A search for a generic phrase like "Post-Athenian coloring contest" has no way to tell a browser which of the paper's several differently timed 2026 promotions actually matches a family's intent, and a page for a spring or summer round offers nothing useful to someone hoping to enter a Halloween-themed drawing. Saving the specific Halloween-dated address, once one exists for 2026, removes that guesswork entirely.

Athens and McMinn County, between Knoxville and Chattanooga

Athens is the seat of McMinn County, Tennessee, sitting in the stretch of East Tennessee along I-75 roughly between Knoxville to the north and Chattanooga to the south. That position puts a fair number of Daily Post-Athenian readers within reach of either metro's shopping and school districts rather than confined to Athens proper.

Nothing published for this contest narrows entries to Athens city limits specifically. A McMinn County family living closer to the Knoxville side, or the Chattanooga side, of the county has no stated reason to assume a coloring-page entry submitted from either end of the county would be turned away.

What to do while the ballot sits between cycles

With no 2026 date confirmed, the useful move right now is watching dailypostathenian.secondstreetapp.com rather than acting on a guessed reopening date. Once a live entry form does appear, going back to the same relatives and neighbors more than once, spaced out over a few days, does more for a child's entry than a single message sent to everyone at once.

The Second Street platform behind this contest also runs behind hundreds of other local promotions nationwide, and it actively watches for irregular voting patterns. A flag against a six-year-old, kid-focused contest carries a worse look than the same mistake on a brand-new program, since the paper would have to weigh that risk against a program families have come to expect every fall. Is buying votes legal lays out that boundary directly, and buying votes online covers what a paid push can honestly promise for a photo-voting format once this contest's next edition actually opens.