2026 Corpus Christi Community's Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

A nominating business needs the Caller-Times ballot basics first

If your business just landed a nomination spot in the Corpus Christi Community's Choice Awards, the practical questions come fast. Who actually runs this ballot, where does the voting happen, and what window are you asking your customers to work with? The short version is that the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, the city's daily newspaper, organizes the program and hosts it on Second Street, the platform Gannett uses across its contest hubs. The voting URL sits on caller.gannettcontests.com, the paper's own contest domain, alongside its sweepstakes and other promotions.

The program is a best-of readers ballot for the Corpus Christi market, which places it in the business awards vertical rather than anything to do with elections or government honors. Support is measured in public votes cast on the Caller-Times ballot. The table below gathers the confirmed facts a nominating business needs at a glance.

Two structural points matter before you plan anything else. The program runs a nomination round before voting, and only the top five companies from that round appear on the voting ballot. And the contest hub carries a winners page for each edition, so results stay visible after the close. Everything a supporter or a business does next follows from those two facts.

The dated history of this ballot

The confirmed window for the most recent cycle is the 2026 voting round, which ran July 9 through July 24 before closing. That window is the anchor for everything on this page: it is the period when supporters could cast ballots, when a daily voting habit counted, and when a business pushing for votes had its audience's attention. A separate nomination round feeds the ballot, and the nominees in the voting round consist of the top five companies from that earlier stage.

On recurrence, the history is solid. The Community's Choice Awards has put a confirmed edition on the Caller-Times contest hub every year from 2023 through 2026, four straight cycles, all published through Second Street. Each of those years also has its own ballot page and winners page on the hub, so the paper has consistently published both the voting round and the results. That string of editions is what qualifies the program as an annual fixture of the Corpus Christi market.

What the organizer has not put in print ahead of a cycle is the detail a planner actually wants: the full category roster, the exact nomination dates for the next edition, and the eligibility wording for nominees and voters. Those items change hands between cycles, so the live ballot is the source of truth on all of them, and you should confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Timing for 2027 is the natural follow-up question. The 2026 window fell in July, but a single confirmed July window is not a published rule for every future cycle. The Caller-Times announces each edition through its own hub, and that announcement is where the next dates will appear first.

How a supporter votes on this ballot

The mechanic a supporter performs is straightforward. During an active voting round, the supporter opens the Caller-Times ballot at caller.gannettcontests.com, browses the categories on the Second Street ballot, picks a business in each category they want to complete, and submits. The ballot loads as a standard voting ballot on the contest hub rather than as a newspaper article, so the interaction is a selection-and-submit flow.

The rhythm that matters is the daily return. Published guidance for the Corpus Christi program states that supporters can vote once a day per category when the voting round is active. That per-category daily allowance is what makes multi-category nominees especially valuable to a business: the same loyal customer can legitimately support one business in several categories across the window. The nomination stage sits in front of all of this, and only the top five companies from that stage reach the voting ballot.

What the ballot does not publish in advance is the fine print: how the organizer handles a single supporter's overall volume across categories, whether registration or an email step is required on the Second Street form, and any eligibility wording for voters. The form itself states those terms when a round is live.

After the close, the hub's winners page for the edition names the results. Supporters who miss the window can still see how their picks finished, and businesses can point at the results page when the next nomination round opens.

How this ballot sits among Texas readers polls

Corpus Christi is not the only Texas market with a public-vote readers poll, but each ballot answers to a different publisher. The nearest named neighbours on this site are the Best of Austin Readers Poll, Best of Dallas Readers' Choice, Best of El Paso, Best of San Antonio, Best of Houston and Best of Fort Worth. None of those programs shares an organizer with Corpus Christi, so their categories, dates and rules do not transfer.

What makes the Community's Choice Awards distinct in that lineup is its publisher. The Corpus Christi Caller-Times is a Gannett newspaper, and its ballot runs on Second Street through the caller.gannettcontests.com hub. That gives the program a corporate platform backbone while keeping every editorial decision, from the category roster to the winners page, with the local masthead. A business nominated here is playing by Caller-Times rules, not the rules of a magazine poll in another city.

For a business working several Texas markets at once, the practical takeaway is to treat each program separately. The Corpus Christi ballot's July voting window, its nomination-then-vote structure and its daily per-category allowance describe this program only. If you also have nominations in the Best of San Antonio or the Best of Houston, read those ballots on their own pages before planning support, and compare mechanics with the Best of Austin Readers Poll only as context, never as a rulebook.

The shared lesson across all of them is that local voters respond to local framing. Corpus Christi supporters vote for businesses they already use, and the Caller-Times ballot is where that support shows up.

Strengthening support in this program

Support in the Community's Choice Awards is built on the daily per-category habit the ballot itself defines. A business that finishes in the top five of its nomination round has a voting window in which every customer who returns each day and marks every relevant category is doing the maximum the program's published guidance describes. So the outreach that fits this program is calendar-based: tell customers when the round opens, remind them mid-window, and make a final push before the close.

Keep the ask specific. Name the categories where the business is nominated, since a supporter's daily allowance applies per category, and point them at the Caller-Times ballot rather than at a search result. What the organizer permits beyond organic asks is a matter of the Caller-Times' own rules for each cycle, and the general question of paid support is discussed on our votes guide. Whatever route a business takes, the mechanics of this Second Street ballot, a July window and a daily return, are the frame the effort has to fit.