Wichita Falls Community's Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes and why the Wichita Falls Community's Choice Awards exists

The Wichita Falls Community's Choice Awards is built around local residents, not a judging panel. The program page states its purpose plainly: it celebrates the top businesses and organizations across the Wichita Falls area. That makes it a community-first award, where the people who live and shop in the market decide who wins, and it places the program in the business vertical rather than in dining, entertainment or people-focused polls.

The organizer is the Gannett / USA TODAY Network paper that serves the Wichita Falls market. The ballot lives at yourchoiceawards.com/wichitafalls/, part of the Your Choice Awards family of community ballots that Gannett markets run. The page footer carries a USA TODAY NETWORK Ventures copyright line, matching that organizer.

Wichita Falls sits in the North Texas / Red River market, and the program is scoped to that market rather than to the whole state. A supporter does not need to own a business to take part: nominations and voting are both open to the public, and the page speaks to residents directly when it invites them to celebrate the area's local businesses.

The fixed points of the program are collected in the table below, and every entry in it comes from the program's own page and platform listing.

The dated record for the Wichita Falls ballot

Confirmed editions cover 2025 and 2026, each carried on the Your Choice Awards ballot for Wichita Falls. The platform's own promotion listing shows the 2026 cycle, and the live ballot carried both years, so the program has run more than once and the platform treats it as a yearly fixture rather than a one-time promotion.

The 2026 cycle ran in three phases. The nomination round ran April 9-30, 2026, and the page framed it as the point where it all begins. When nominations closed, the companies that led each category moved forward into the vote, which ran June 16-30, 2026. Once voting ended, the page set the winners announcement for August 23, 2026.

The nomination phase also carried a personal incentive: the page told nominators they would be entered to win a $250 prize. That figure belongs to the nomination round, not to the winning businesses, and the page does not describe a prize for the nominees themselves.

What the program has not put in print is the full list of categories behind its ballot, or the eligibility rules for which businesses can be nominated; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. For 2027, the platform expects another cycle, though the ballot page has published no dates for it yet.

How a supporter votes on the Your Choice Awards ballot

Supporters here follow a plain public ballot with two stages. First comes nomination: while the nomination round is open, residents submit the Wichita Falls area businesses and organizations they want on the ballot. The page then explains what happens next: after nominations, the leading nominees in every category reach the vote. So the final ballot is not open-ended; it is the field that the nomination stage produced.

Once the voting round is active, the ballot carries a long list of categories, and the page allows one vote per day in each category while voting is open. That rule shapes how support actually works. A single visit produces a limited contribution, and the supporters who matter are the ones who come back the following day and the day after that, in each category where their favorite business appears.

Voting itself needs no purchase and no payment on the ballot. The page never says whether a login is needed, so a supporter simply opens the category, selects the business and submits, and follows whatever step the live form presents at that moment. Because the frequency rule is per category, a supporter who cares about several local businesses can back each of them on the same day without touching the same category twice.

After voting closes, the page moves to its winners section, where results are published once the announcement date arrives.

Where this ballot sits among the Texas best-of programs

Texas carries a long row of reader-voted programs, and the Wichita Falls Community's Choice Awards is the small-market, business-focused member of that row. The state's other confirmed ballots include the Best of Austin Readers Poll, the Best of Dallas Readers' Choice, Best of El Paso, Best of Houston, Best of San Antonio and Best of Fort Worth from Fort Worth Magazine.

Each of those has its own publisher, window and rules, so nothing that applies to one transfers to another. What sets the Wichita Falls program apart is its scope and its subject. It is scoped to one North Texas market near the Red River rather than to a metropolitan region, and its subject is the top businesses and organizations across the area, which puts local shops, services and organizations on the ballot instead of the restaurant and entertainment lists that dominate big-city reader polls.

Among this Texas group, the Community's Choice name on Your Choice Awards appears only here, with the local Gannett masthead behind it. A supporter moving between these ballots should therefore check each program's own page for its dates and rules, because the nomination-then-vote shape this program uses is not a guarantee that its neighbours follow the same schedule.

Strengthening support for a nominee on this ballot

Support on this ballot is built out of repeat daily visits, because the printed rule allows a daily vote in every category while the window is open. For a Wichita Falls business, that translates into a reminder rhythm: tell customers at the counter, in receipts and in email that the voting round is live and that their vote counts again tomorrow. The nomination round matters just as much, since only the leading nominees in every category make the final ballot at all.

The organizer's page prints a frequency rule but no statement about outside help, paid promotion or vote services, so a nominee weighing purchased support is working from the ballot's own terms. The ballot is a public vote with a daily limit, and the organizer publishes no guidance either way on third-party votes. For the range of approaches and their trade-offs, see our guide to earning more votes online, and for award-style ballots specifically, our award votes page.