Halloween Coloring Contest 2025: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Halloween Coloring Contest is and who runs it

The Halloween Coloring Contest is a seasonal photo-vote event run by The Daily Post-Athenian, the newspaper serving Athens, Tennessee. Each fall the publisher opens a ballot where readers view submitted coloring pages and vote for the ones they like best. The 2025 edition is the most recent, and its voting window ran from October 28 through November 3, 2025.

The ballot is built on Second Street, a platform widely used by local newspapers for community voting events. The promotion type is listed as UGC voting with photo entries, which matches what the format looks like in practice: families submit finished coloring sheets, the newspaper accepts them onto the ballot, and the public clicks to vote. There is no paid ballot tier for supporters; voting is free.

The contest sits inside a much larger stable of promotions on the same domain. The publisher's Second Street account carries dozens of events for its market, from a July 4th coloring contest to an Easter edition, a MOO Fest coloring contest, and several sweepstakes. The Halloween edition is the one tied to the autumn season, and it is the longest-running of the coloring contests on the account, with editions every year since 2020.

Key facts at a glance

Anyone arriving at the ballot today reaches the closed 2025 edition, because the window has passed. The page still shows the format, the entries and the structure a supporter would vote through, which makes it a useful reference for what the next edition will look like.

The dated record, editions and what is not published

Six editions of this contest are on firm ground: every fall from 2020 through 2025. Each of those years has its own ballot page on the newspaper's Second Street address, each carrying its own dated window. That makes this one of the steadier seasonal events among Tennessee publisher ballots, where many contests appear for a year or two and then vanish.

The 2025 cycle is the best-dated of the run. It opened on October 28, 2025 and closed on November 3, 2025, a short window of about a week that fits the Halloween-to-early-November pattern the contest follows. Earlier editions' exact open and close dates belong to their own ballot pages, and the only range-level evidence across the run points to the contest falling somewhere between late summer and early November depending on the year.

Three things the organizer has not put in print on the material here: which categories divide the entries, whether there is a ceiling on votes per person, and who is eligible to enter or to win. Those are the questions most likely to matter to a family entering a coloring page, and they are exactly the ones to confirm on the live ballot each cycle, because a publisher this small can adjust its format year to year without notice.

The contest's status for the current cycle is closed. The newspaper has not announced the 2026 edition's dates in the material available here, and no guess at them belongs on a reference page. Given six consecutive years, a seventh edition in 2026 is the natural expectation, and the ballot page for the new year is where the dates will appear first.

How a supporter votes on this ballot today

Voting here is a photo ballot, not a written list. A supporter opens the contest page on the newspaper's Second Street address, scrolls through the coloring entries the publisher has accepted, and clicks the vote control on the picture they want to back. There is no login gate described in the ballot material, and no paid voting option exists on this contest.

The mechanic is the same one the newspaper uses for its other holiday coloring contests, which is worth knowing if you arrive at the wrong page. During the 2025 window the same account also carried an Easter edition from April and a July 4th edition from July, both built on the identical photo-vote format, so a supporter who has voted in one will recognize the layout of the others immediately.

What the ballot does not tell you is how often a single supporter may vote. The organizer has left that rule unpublished, so the safest practice is to follow whatever the page itself prompts: if it allows another vote the next day it will say so, and if it blocks repeats the control will say that instead. Treat the page as the rulebook rather than assuming a standard once-a-day arrangement applies.

Timing matters more than technique on a window this short. A week between October 28 and November 3 gives an entrant little room to gather support, so families who want their entry seen need to share it with relatives and friends early in the window rather than near the close. Once the window ends the ballot closes and no further votes count, which is the state the 2025 page is in now.

How this contest sits beside its Tennessee neighbours

Most public-vote programs in this state are readers-choice awards covering whole cities: CommunityVotes Chattanooga, the Chattanooga Times Free Press Best of the Best, and Cityview Best of the Best in Knoxville all run long category lists where businesses compete across months. The Halloween Coloring Contest is nothing like them. It is a single-week, single-topic event built around children's artwork for one newspaper's home market.

That difference changes how support works. A readers-choice ballot rewards a business with months of campaigning across a big customer base; a coloring contest rewards a family that can rally its own circle of relatives and friends inside a few days. The vote counts are small, the window is short, and the outcome is decided quickly once November 3 passes.

Among the siblings there are also performing-arts ballots, the BroadwayWorld Memphis Awards and the BroadwayWorld Nashville Awards, which vote on theatre productions rather than local businesses, plus the Knoxville HBA Parade of Homes from the building industry. None of them shares this contest's holiday anchor or its family-entry format, which is what makes the Daily Post-Athenian's event distinctive in the state's ballot landscape.

Its closest relatives are actually on its own publisher's account: the July 4th, Easter and MOO Fest coloring contests run by the same newspaper on the same platform. A supporter comparing Tennessee ballots should therefore decide first what kind of event they are dealing with, a citywide business award or a publisher's seasonal family contest, because the strategy for gathering votes differs completely between the two.