Cutest Pet Contest 2025 (carrollnews): How Voting Works & How to Win

A weekly paper's pet photo ballot for Hillsville readers

The Cutest Pet Contest is a reader photo contest run by The Carroll News, a weekly newspaper based in Hillsville, Virginia. The paper puts the ballot on Second Street, the balloting service that also carries its other reader promotions, and each edition lives at a year-specific address under carrollnews.secondstreetapp.com.

The format is a photo-vote contest in the UGCVoting pattern Second Street uses for picture ballots. Pet owners submit a photograph of their animal during the entry phase, and readers then vote for their favorite. It is a public-vote mechanic: the community decides the winner, not a panel of judges, and any reader who reaches the ballot can participate in the voting phase.

Among the paper's promotions the pet contest sits beside quizzes, sweepstakes and the paper's own Gemini Awards ballot, but it is the one built entirely around reader-submitted animals. That gives it a different feel from a business-ranking readers choice: the entrants are pets and their owners rather than local merchants, and the emotional pull of the photos is what drives sharing.

For readers in and around Hillsville, this is the paper's signature feel-good ballot of the fall, and the one its audience most readily shares with neighbors.

Six straight editions, and a fall window that just closed

The contest has run every edition year from 2020 through 2025, an unbroken string of six editions on the Second Street host. Each round occupies its own address: the 2020 edition sits at the Cutest-Pet-Contest-2020 path, and the series continues on matching year paths up through Cutest-Pet-Contest-2025. That year-by-year chain is the clearest evidence of the program's annual rhythm.

The 2025 round is the most recent and it is closed. It launched on October 22, 2025, ran through the late fall, and shut down on November 26, 2025. The whole window sits inside roughly five weeks, which is typical of the photo-vote contests Second Street carries: a short entry push, a voting stretch, and a hard close before the December holidays, where the paper's separate Christmas lights ballot picks up the seasonal audience.

With 2025 closed, the next expected edition is 2026, following the paper's pattern of one round per calendar year. The publisher has not printed a launch date for it, and no prize value, winner announcement or category list for the 2025 round appears in what the organizer has put out so far. Anyone planning an entry for the next cycle should watch the paper's own channels, and treat the details that shift between editions as things to verify against the ballot itself once it reopens.

How a supporter votes in this photo ballot

Voting here is straightforward because the mechanic is a standard Second Street photo contest. When an edition is open, a supporter goes to the current year's ballot address, finds the photo grid of entered pets, and clicks a vote for the animal they want to support. Depending on how the publisher configured the ballot, a vote may ask for an email address or a quick verification step before it registers.

Entry works the same way through the ballot itself. An owner who wants their pet in the running submits a photo during the entry phase the paper announces with the launch. Because the 2025 ballot is closed, neither entry nor voting is possible right now; both actions only exist while a live edition is running. Nothing about the closed ballot carries forward, so a supporter who missed November 2025 simply waits for the next launch.

The one thing to watch is repeat voting. Second Street ballots control how often a person can vote through their own settings, and the publisher has not printed that rule anywhere this page draws on. The practical instruction is the same every cycle: vote the way the live ballot permits, stop when it says you have reached its limit, and never assume the previous edition's behavior matches the current one. The ballot enforces itself, and the entry that respects it is the entry that keeps its votes.

How this ballot sits beside its Virginia neighbors

Virginia has a deep bench of public-vote programs, and this one is small and hyper-local next to most of them. The big readers choice ballots in the state, such as Best of Arlington or the Daily Progress Charlottesville Readers' Choice, rank hundreds of local businesses across dozens of categories. The Cutest Pet Contest ranks one thing, entered pets, through one simple mechanic, photo voting.

Within the Carroll News's own Second Street account the pet contest is also distinct from the paper's other formats. Its sweepstakes collect entries without a vote, its quizzes test knowledge, and the Best of Coastal Virginia Magazine ballot on this site shows how much bigger a magazine-scale readers choice runs. Even the paper's own Gemini Awards, a category ballot, works differently from a photo vote.

What makes this program different is its audience. Hillsville is a small weekly-paper market, so a pet's support network is genuinely local: family, coworkers, church groups and classmates. That closeness is why photo votes spread so fast here compared with the wide-geography ballots like the BroadwayWorld Central Virginia Awards or the Best of Charlottesville, where supporters are spread thin.

Strengthening support in this particular ballot

A pet contest is won by reach, and in Hillsville reach means the people who already know the owner. The most effective legitimate push for a photo ballot like this is a personal share of the pet's ballot link with a real photo of the animal attached, sent to the circles most likely to act: relatives, coworkers, youth sports groups and church communities. A message with the pet's name and a specific ask outperforms a bare link every time.

The organizer's position here rests on the ballot's own settings. The paper publishes no statement on outside help for this contest, and Second Street enforces whatever repeat-vote control the publisher switched on, so any push has to work inside the limit the live ballot shows. Tactics that depend on automated voting risk the votes already cast, and no contest win is guaranteed by volume alone.

Timing matters too. The window runs a few weeks, and late-arriving votes cluster near the close, so a supporter who spreads asks across the window instead of one final push gives the ballot's pace-checking less reason to question the entry. For tactics that transfer to photo ballots generally, see our votes guide, and for the wider question of paid support read our award-votes overview.