San Juan Island Scarecrow Contest: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the San Juan Island Scarecrow Contest is and who runs it

The San Juan Island Scarecrow Contest is a seasonal community ballot run by the San Juan Island Chamber of Commerce, working with Friends of the Library. It sits on the chamber's own website at sanjuanisland.org/scarecrow-contest/, which means the registration form, the voter map and the vote itself all live on one page controlled by the organizer. There is no third-party contest platform in the middle of it.

The chamber is a Friday Harbor institution. Its site carries an event calendar with Restaurant Week, Friday Harbor Winterfest, a Christmas Tree Lighting with Santa's Workshop and a 4th of July listing, and the Scarecrow Contest appears in that same fall stretch of programming. The chamber's mailing address is First Street South, PO Box 98, Friday Harbor, WA 98250, which anchors the contest firmly to San Juan Island rather than to any statewide ballot.

structurally the contest belongs to the same family as the best-of ballots listed later on this page, but in spirit it is closer to a decorated-display event: businesses and households register a scarecrow, the chamber maps every registered display so supporters can find them, and the public votes for a favorite. For a nominating business, that shape matters. Your entry competes on visibility around the island as much as on the vote count, and the map is where both meet.

Facts at a glance

The dated timeline for the Friday Harbor scarecrow ballot

The scarecrow contest's confirmed years are 2024, 2025 and 2026, all carried on the chamber's own contest page. That three-year stretch makes it an established fall fixture on San Juan Island, not a one-off experiment, and the 2026 page is the live cycle this guide describes. The chamber has not announced a 2027 contest on the page covered here.

The 2026 schedule is the most detailed part of the timeline. Scarecrow registration opens well before voting and closes on October 19th, and the chamber explains why: it builds the map for all the voters once registration ends. Voting then begins October 24th and ends October 28th. The whole public vote therefore fits inside five days at the end of October, which is the single most important dated fact for any business counting on support.

What the page does not carry is a category list. The chamber publishes no roster of ballot categories or judging divisions for the scarecrow vote; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. That gap is worth taking seriously if you are registering a display, because the contest page is otherwise explicit about dates and about the one-vote-per-person request, and silence on categories is the one place it leaves a nominator guessing.

One more boundary: the chamber's page does not state how results are announced or what winners receive. Those details sit outside the dates above, and the contest page is the only place the organizer has published anything about this cycle.

How a supporter votes in the 2026 scarecrow contest

Voting here takes four plain moves. A supporter goes to the Scarecrow Contest page at sanjuanisland.org, finds the scarecrow location map the chamber published after registration closed on October 19th, visits or identifies the displays they like, and casts one vote for a favorite between October 24th and October 28th. The page's printed request is one vote per person, and that single sentence is the only per-supporter rule the chamber prints.

The map is the part that makes this ballot different from a plain online poll. Because the contest celebrates physical scarecrow displays around San Juan Island, the chamber asks registrants to submit their location "so we can create the map for all the voters." A supporter in Friday Harbor can therefore turn the vote into a small tour, which is also why the five-day window works: the displays are already up, the map is already out, and the vote just closes the loop.

There is no indication on the contest page of an account requirement, a login wall or a fee. The vote is presented as open public participation on the chamber's own site, which keeps friction low for supporters and means a display's vote count depends on how many people actually reach the page during those five October days.

For a registered business, the practical reading is this: the organizer's rule caps each person at a single vote, so breadth of reach across the island is the only thing that scales. Every supporter who finds the display through the chamber's map can add exactly one vote, and the window closes hard on October 28th.

How this ballot sits beside other Washington public votes

The San Juan Island Scarecrow Contest answers to the San Juan Island Chamber of Commerce and no one else. It is worth naming the neighbours precisely, because none of them share its ballot or its rules. The Washington programs covered on this site are Best of 425 around Bellevue and the Eastside, Cascade's Best, Best of Clark County run with The Columbian, the Everett Herald's Best of Snohomish County, KING5's Best of Western Washington, and the Seattle Medium's Best of the Best Northwest Readers' Choice.

What separates the scarecrow ballot from all six is scale and shape. Those are media and regional best-of contests with category rosters and business listings across wide markets. The scarecrow contest is a single island's seasonal display vote, hosted on the chamber's own domain, mapped physically, and run with Friends of the Library as a partner. Its confirmed years are 2024, 2025 and 2026, and its window is five days long.

For a business on San Juan Island, that difference is an advantage. Competing in a chamber-run island vote puts the entry in front of a community that can actually walk past the scarecrow, and the one-vote-per-person request means each supporter's visit carries the same weight. Nothing from a Bellevue or Clark County ballot carries over here, and no figure from those programs belongs on this one.

Strengthening support inside this contest's own rules

Everything that helps a scarecrow entry here flows from the two facts the chamber prints: registration closes October 19th, and the vote runs October 24th to 28th with one vote per person. Register early so the display makes the voter map, place it where passersby in Friday Harbor will see it, and use the four days between registration close and voting open to let regulars know it is up and on the map.

The chamber's page sets no published procedure for outside help, and its single printed rule is the one-vote-per-person request. A display supported by people who each vote once inside the window sits squarely inside what the organizer asks for. For a fuller discussion of outreach methods and their limits in community ballots, see our votes guide, and for context on how support programs are treated across contests generally, our award votes page covers the wider category.

No organizer in this market publishes a guarantee about outcomes, and the chamber's short window means a display's result is decided quickly and finally each October.