ABB Scarecrow Contest (Bridgeport): How Voting Works & How to Win

What the ABB Scarecrow Contest is and who runs it

The ABB Scarecrow Contest (Bridgeport) is a community award program run by Associated Businesses of Bridgeport (ABB), the business organization behind the Connect-Bridgeport local news and information site. The contest belongs to the best-of and business vertical: instead of ranking restaurants or services, it celebrates the scarecrows that merchants and organizations put up along Main Street in Bridgeport, West Virginia each fall.

Everything about the vote happens on the organizer's own property. Connect-Bridgeport acts as both publisher and host, so no third-party contest service is interposed between the supporter and the ballot. The voting notice, ABB Scarecrow Voting is Open, runs as a news item on connect-bridgeport.com, and the people's choice ballot is reached from that item. The 2025 announcement was written by a named Connect-Bridgeport contributor and carries an editor's note observing that a few scarecrows were still to be displayed on Main Street at the time of posting, which tells you the display and the voting window overlap rather than waiting for every entry to be up.

That setup matters for how you read any information about the contest. Because Connect-Bridgeport is both the publisher and the host, the news item is the program's official word, and anything not printed there is not settled. The table below gathers the fixed facts about the program.

The dated record for the Bridgeport scarecrow vote

Two editions of the ABB Scarecrow Contest are confirmed: 2022 and 2025. Both are anchored to October, which the published evidence gives as the month for the voting phase in each of those years. The most recent confirmation is unusually precise: the 2025 voting notice carries the headline ABB Scarecrow Voting is Open, was posted on October 10, 2025, and sits in the Connect-Bridgeport news section with the Main Street editor's note attached to it.

The program is marked annual, which fits the shape of the evidence: a fall display, a voting notice, an October ballot, and a repeat in a later year. But the confirmed year list is short, and honesty about it helps a supporter plan. No announcement for a future edition is published ahead of the season, and the entry list for any coming cycle is not printed in advance either. The voting page from the last cycle is where the next cycle will show up first, so the practical habit is to return to the Connect-Bridgeport news section when the displays start appearing and read the fresh notice before voting. No published schedule of the season's open and close dates exists ahead of the notice; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Once the window closes, results and the judges' visit are reported the same way, through Connect-Bridgeport's own news items, which keeps the whole cycle inside one publisher's pages.

How a supporter votes in the Bridgeport people's choice award

Voting in the ABB Scarecrow Contest is deliberately simple because the ballot has to serve everyone walking down Main Street, not only people comfortable with contest platforms. The action is a public vote: open the Connect-Bridgeport news item titled ABB Scarecrow Voting is Open, look over the scarecrow field, and submit a pick through the form on that page. No account creation step is described in the published material, and no third-party login is part of the confirmed flow.

The published material is also clear that the public vote decides only part of the outcome. In the organizer's own words, "In addition to this people's choice award, a panel of judges will visit all scarecrows and through a scoring system will choose one to take this year's judges' award." So a supporter's October vote drives the people's choice award, while the judges' award is settled separately by the visiting panel. A business competing for the public half of the contest needs community votes; a business chasing the judges' half needs a display worth a scoring visit.

Two practical notes follow from the 2025 notice. Some scarecrows were still to be displayed on Main Street when voting opened, so the field you see early may be incomplete. And because the ballot is hosted by ABB itself rather than a national voting service, there is no platform dashboard to check standings on; the news item is the whole interface. Related local contests such as 2026 Best of Harrison use different publishers and mechanics, so do not carry assumptions between them.

How this ballot sits beside its West Virginia neighbours

Bridgeport's scarecrow vote is the most local item on the West Virginia contest map carried here. It is run by a city business organization about a single street's seasonal display, while its neighbours are regional readers-choice programs with far larger ballots. That difference changes both who votes and what winning means: the scarecrow people's choice award is decided by downtown foot traffic and local loyalty, not by a county-wide or tri-state ballot.

The closest neighbours in scale are the county best-of polls. 2026 Best of Harrison covers the county Bridgeport sits in, and 2026 Best of Upshur County and 2026 Best of Marion County run the same idea for adjacent counties. A business can appear in both a county poll and the scarecrow contest without conflict, but the audiences barely overlap: one is a category ballot, the other is a display-and-vote tradition.

Wider still are the state-level programs. Best in the Tri-State and the 2025 River Cities Best of the Best draw across multiple cities and newsrooms, and Best In Show rounds out the state list. None of these share the ABB ballot's host, publisher or window, so a tactic that fits a county poll does not transfer automatically to a Main Street scarecrow display.

Strengthening support for a Bridgeport scarecrow entry

The mechanic of this ballot shapes what helps. Votes come from people who see the display or hear about it, so the highest-value work happens on Main Street and in the weeks before October: a scarecrow worth photographing, a sign telling passersby how to vote, and staff who can name the Connect-Bridgeport voting page from memory. Because the 2025 notice confirmed some entries were still going up after voting opened, an early, finished display draws the attention the late finishers never get, and it does so from the foot traffic that decides this people's choice award.

ABB publishes no rules text about outside assistance for this award, so neither a business nor a supporter can rely on any purchased-vote promise here; the only published statement about how the people's choice award is won is that it follows the public vote. Read the current ballot page before the window opens, and if you are comparing support options across the state's contests, the general playbook in the more-votes guide explains which tactics fit an organizer-run, single-city ballot like this one.