Carroll News Cutest Pet Contest: How Voting Works & How to Win

Six autumns running: what the Carroll News has actually confirmed

The Cutest Pet Contest is the longest-running program covered on this page's own corner of the site: six confirmed editions from a single Hillsville, Virginia weekly, back to back from 2020 through 2025. That kind of run is unusual for a small-town paper's seasonal photo vote, and it says something about how embedded the contest has become in the Carroll News' own autumn calendar.

The Carroll News is the weekly newspaper serving its Hillsville, Virginia home base, and the Cutest Pet Contest is run entirely on its behalf through the Second Street platform, not on any separate contest site of its own.

A photo vote, not a bracket or a nomination round

The mechanics here are simple by design. A pet owner submits a photo of the animal, and readers vote for the entries they find most appealing. There's no earlier nomination stage to clear and no elimination bracket narrowing the field round by round, the way some other Second Street promotions are built. One photo, one open voting window, is the whole shape of it.

Six years of that same format have produced a fairly stable seasonal fixture: the Carroll News has run this contest every autumn since 2020, closing the 2025 round on November 26, 2025. Whether the paper keeps the exact same October-to-November window going forward isn't guaranteed by anything published, even with five prior years pointing that direction.

A separate Carroll News ballot worth naming, not folding in

The Carroll News also runs a separate Gemini Awards ballot through the same Second Street account. It covers different ground, runs on its own calendar, and has no bearing on the Cutest Pet Contest described here; readers looking specifically for the pet-photo vote should stick to the carrollnews.secondstreetapp.com address for this program rather than the Gemini Awards one.

Hillsville's own contest, without importing a bigger region's detail

Hillsville is the town the Carroll News itself is based in, and nothing published widens the Cutest Pet Contest's footprint beyond what the paper's own readership already covers. No neighboring-town breakdown, no regional service-area map and no county-by-county tally appears anywhere on the listing.

That keeps this contest distinct from the state's larger magazine-run "best of" ballots, several of which explicitly cover a metro area or an entire region rather than one paper's own hometown readership. A Hillsville family entering a pet here is entering a genuinely local vote, not a statewide one dressed up to look small.

Turning six years of trust into one more solid entry

A program with this much history behind it tends to draw a loyal, repeat readership every autumn, which cuts both ways for a new entrant: competition is real, but so is the appetite among Carroll News readers for scrolling through a fresh batch of local pets every year. Picking a genuinely clear, well-lit photo matters more here than in a contest running its first or second year, since regular voters have years of past entries already in mind to compare against.

With no published vote cap, the responsible path is asking the same honest circle of supporters to return across the full six-week window rather than trying to compress everything into the final days. Building real momentum for an online ballot covers outreach that suits a long-running community vote like this one, and buying votes online explains what a paid push typically looks like against a photo-entry format with no stated daily limit.

Six years also means six years of families who already know the drill: friends of friends who entered a dog or a barn cat back in an earlier autumn, and neighbors who now check the Carroll News page out of habit once the leaves start turning. A new entrant benefits from that built-in audience showing up on its own, even before any outreach begins, simply because the contest itself has become part of how this Hillsville readership marks the season.

None of that changes what actually decides a round: real people clicking a real vote on carrollnews.secondstreetapp.com, for a photo that is genuinely of the pet entered rather than a stand-in image. A caption naming the pet, its town, and maybe a line about how it got its name gives casual browsers a reason to stop scrolling and vote, which matters more on a photo ballot than on a simple name-only nomination. Small, honest touches like that tend to matter more over six competitive autumns than any shortcut ever could.