2026 Readers' Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the 2026 Readers' Choice Awards are and who runs them

The 2026 Readers' Choice Awards is a best-of ballot in the readers' choice tradition, run by the Kilgore News Herald, a Texas newspaper publishing under kilgorenewsherald.com. The program sits in the business vertical: the subjects readers vote for are the local businesses, services and institutions a newspaper's audience uses every week, and the winner in each category is whichever name collects the most public support.

The ballot itself lives on Second Street, the contest platform that also carries the newspaper's other promotions. The 2026 address is kilgorenewsherald.secondstreetapp.com/2026-Readers-Choice-Awards, and every edition gets its own year-stamped page under the same host. The 2026 promotion is typed as a NominationAndVotingBallot, which means the nomination phase and the voting phase are built into a single promotion rather than run as two separate events.

The mechanic is a plain public vote. There is no jury, no entry fee and no paid tier on the ballot itself; a name wins because supporters showed up and voted. That is the standard shape for a newspaper readers' choice program, and it is why the ballot's open window matters so much to nominated businesses: support can only be gathered while the form accepts it.

The dated history behind this ballot

Three editions of the Readers' Choice Awards are confirmed on the Second Street host: 2024, 2025 and 2026, each under its own year-stamped address. That three-year run is what marks the program as an annual fixture on the newspaper's promotions calendar rather than a single experiment, and it means a business nominated in 2026 is likely to meet the same ballot again, in the same format, in 2027.

The 2026 window is the most precisely dated. The promotion opened on January 12, 2026 and closed on March 2, 2026, a run of roughly seven weeks that sits entirely inside the first quarter. The ballot is now closed, so no votes can be cast in the 2026 round, and any business still pointing customers at the 2026 address is sending them to a dead form.

Two things are missing from the published listing: the category roster for any edition, and any rule on how frequently one supporter may vote; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Those two gaps shape how a nominated business should plan: the category list determines where a business can appear, and the voting-frequency rule determines whether support is a single push or a repeated habit across the whole window.

How a supporter votes on this ballot

Voting happens on the Second Street page for the current edition. A supporter opens the year-stamped address, in 2026 that was kilgorenewsherald.secondstreetapp.com/2026-Readers-Choice-Awards, and works through the ballot form. Because the promotion is a NominationAndVotingBallot, the form serves two purposes: early in the window it accepts nominations for favorites that are not yet listed, and once voting opens it accepts votes in each category.

The practical sequence is short. Open the ballot, find the category that fits the business you want to support, and submit a vote. If the business you have in mind is not listed, the nomination phase is the moment to add it, which is why businesses that want to appear on the ballot benefit from asking supporters early rather than waiting for voting to open.

Two details are not part of the published listing. Whether the form asks for an email address or any registration before accepting a vote is not stated, and neither is any limit on repeat voting. Both belong to the live form itself, and both can change between editions, so a supporter who voted in 2025 should not assume the 2026 form behaved the same way. The one constant across all three confirmed editions is the host: every edition has lived on the same Second Street address pattern, with only the year in the path changing.

Where this ballot sits among Texas readers' choice programs

Texas has a crowded field of readers' choice ballots, and this program is the small-market entry in it. The Kilgore News Herald's awards answer to a single newspaper and its own audience, while the metro polls cover far larger cities under separate publishers. The nearest comparisons on this site are the Best of Austin Readers Poll, the Best of Dallas Readers' Choice, the Best of El Paso, the Best of Houston, the Best of San Antonio and Best of Fort Worth.

None of those programs shares a ballot with this one. A vote cast in the metro polls carries no weight here, and a business nominated in Dallas or Houston gains nothing in the Kilgore News Herald's ballot without its own supporters. That matters for any business with customers across several Texas markets: each readers' choice program needs its own push, timed to its own window.

What makes this ballot distinctive within the group is its scale and its host. It is the only program in the set run by a single-community newspaper rather than a metro publication, and it runs on Second Street alongside the newspaper's sweepstakes promotions, which gives the ballot a home audience that already visits the host for other reasons. For a local business, that mix of a loyal readership and a short annual window is the whole opportunity.

Strengthening support while this ballot is open

Because this is a public-vote ballot, every vote has to come from a person willing to click, and the organizer has published no rules addressing outside help, purchased support or automated voting alongside the listing. That silence cuts both ways: nothing on the listing authorizes bulk or automated voting, and a business that relies on it has no published rule to point to if the outcome is questioned. The safe reading is that support should look like what the ballot is for, which is real people in the newspaper's audience voting for a favorite.

The dependable methods are the unglamorous ones. Ask customers in person while the window is open, put the ballot link in an email or a receipt, and remind people more than once, because a single mention in the first week rarely survives to the closing date. Since the 2026 window ran from January 12 to March 2, a business had roughly seven weeks to work with, and the nomination phase at the front of that window was the moment to make sure the business appeared in its category at all.

For a fuller walkthrough of outreach that holds up on newspaper ballots like this, see our guide to getting more votes online.