Auburn's Downtown Sculpture Gallery People's Choice Award: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Auburn sculpture People's Choice Award is

Auburn's Downtown Sculpture Gallery People's Choice Award is a public art prize run by the City of Auburn, the municipal government of Auburn, Washington. Each cycle the city installs a Downtown Sculpture Gallery outdoors, and visitors to the gallery are invited to vote for the piece they like best. The sculpture that collects the most public support receives the People's Choice Award.

The current gallery, billed as Auburn's 2025-2026 Downtown Sculpture Gallery, showcases 13 outdoor sculptures of various sizes, types and mediums. The city states that the works are primarily located along Main Street and that the gallery changes annually, providing different artwork for residents and visitors to encounter. The People's Choice Award sits on top of that rotating exhibit as the single element of the program decided entirely by public vote.

The ballot is hosted by the city itself. The City of Auburn distributes it through a GovDelivery bulletin at content.govdelivery.com, and the voting link on this page points to that bulletin. No third-party contest platform stands between the voter and the city's announcement; the bulletin serves as ballot, rules sheet and press release at the same time.

In contest terms the program reads as a best-of ballot: a fixed field of nominees, a single question, and a winner decided by whoever turns out. The difference is the nominee class. Instead of businesses or restaurants, the field is public sculpture, and the organizer is a city government rather than a media publisher.

The dated facts for the 2025-2026 cycle

For this program the dated facts are short and specific. The City of Auburn sent the current bulletin on September 19, 2025, announcing the 2025-2026 gallery under the heading "NEW ON VIEW!". The edition years confirmed for the program are 2025 and 2026, and the city's own text calls the People's Choice Award annual, so the program recurs on a yearly rhythm anchored to the gallery season.

The live voting window closes at the end of July 2026. The bulletin states this plainly: "Voting is open until the end of July 2026." What the bulletin does not state is the exact final day of the window, so a supporter planning around a specific date should confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The organizer has also not printed a category list for the sculpture vote.

Two further dated facts complete the picture. The winner of the People's Choice Award will be announced in August 2026, and the award includes a $500 prize. Both statements come from the same city bulletin that carries the ballot.

Nothing else about the schedule is published. There are no platform round dates and no stated date for when the next gallery season would open. A reader who needs any of those should treat the July 2026 close and the August 2026 announcement as the only fixed points and check the city's bulletin before acting on them.

How a supporter votes in the Auburn sculpture ballot

Voting in the Auburn sculpture award is a plain public vote. A supporter opens the city's GovDelivery bulletin, reads through the 2025-2026 gallery, and casts a vote for a favorite sculpture. No login, entry form or judging panel sits between the reader and the count; the award goes to whichever piece the public backs.

The bulletin does not print a per-voter rule for the current cycle. What the city has said elsewhere is a plan for future years: "a new form would be used that would allow each device, a phone, computer or tablet to only vote once." That statement describes an intended form, not a rule in force today, so the operative instruction for this cycle is simply to vote for a favorite sculpture and let the city's form handle any limits.

Practical notes on the mechanic. The ballot is reached through the bulletin at the voting link on this page, so the supporter's initial action is opening that page rather than hunting for a standalone contest site. The sculptures are installed outdoors along Main Street in Auburn, which means a voter can see the field in person before choosing. And because the close falls at the end of July 2026 rather than on a single announced day, the city has left the pace of voting to the public.

How this ballot sits beside its Washington neighbours

Auburn's sculpture ballot sits in a Washington best-of field that is mostly made up of media reader polls. The sibling programs on this site include Best of 425 covering the Bellevue Eastside, Cascade's Best, Best of Clark County from the Columbian, Best of Snohomish County from the Everett Herald, Best of Western Washington from KING 5, and the Best of the Best Northwest Readers' Choice from the Seattle Medium. Each of those is a broad reader-voting franchise with a publisher behind it.

This program differs on every axis that matters for a supporter. The organizer is a city government, not a publisher, so the ballot arrives through a municipal GovDelivery bulletin instead of a media contest platform. The nominee class is public sculpture rather than businesses or service providers. The question count is minimal: a single People's Choice vote instead of a multi-category ballot. And the prize is a $500 award to the winning piece rather than a marketing badge.

For a reader comparing Washington ballots, the practical consequence is scope. The sibling polls draw from regional audiences across the state; the Auburn award draws from whoever walks Main Street or reads the city's bulletin. Support in the sculpture vote is therefore built from a smaller, more local pool, which changes both the campaign tactics and the odds.

Building support in a local public-art vote

Support in this ballot behaves differently from a media poll because the audience is local by design. The sculptures stand along Main Street in Auburn, so the most direct way a supporter strengthens a favorite is to bring people to the street: friends, coworkers, clients, anyone who will walk the gallery and vote for a piece they have actually seen. The city's bulletin is the shareable object; forwarding it with a personal note about a specific sculpture does more than a generic plea.

On outside help, the City of Auburn has published little. The city has described a future form intended to let each device vote only once, which signals that it cares about duplicate voting, but no rule about paid or coordinated support is printed on the bulletin. Anyone weighing outside help should first read the legal position at is buying votes legal, and the general tactics guide at how to get more votes online covers methods that do not depend on this ballot's unpublished rules.