Best of the Lakeshore Community's Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes and why the Lakeshore ballot matters

Readers-choice voting is the whole idea behind the Best of the Lakeshore Community's Choice Awards, a program that celebrates favorite businesses and organizations across the Lakeshore area around Manitowoc, Wisconsin. The local Gannett paper in the USA TODAY Network runs it, the same publisher behind The Herald Times Reporter, and the ballot sits at yourchoiceawards.com/manitowoc/ on the Your Choice Awards site. Customers, not a judging panel, decide which restaurant, shop, clinic or service provider tops each list.

Reach is wide. Each year the program recognizes over 450 businesses and organizations, a reach it credits to community involvement, and the ballot spans a broad list of categories. That scale matters when reading the results: a first-place finish in a Lakeshore category reflects hundreds of daily ballots from real customers in the Manitowoc market, which is why winners earn print treatment in the paper.

Structure comes in two phases. A nomination round opens the cycle and lets supporters put businesses forward; once nominations close, the leading companies in every category move ahead to the voting round, where the community decides. Voters get something back too: anyone who votes in 25 or more categories goes into the draw for a $250 prize, and a second $250 prize promotion also appears on the ballot.

The dated record for the Lakeshore Community's Choice Awards

The program is annual, and its confirmed years are 2025 and 2026 on the Your Choice Awards ballot for Manitowoc. The 2025 cycle left a print trail: results were published July 27, 2025 in The Herald Times Reporter, which anchors the program's first confirmed edition to that year.

The 2026 calendar was printed in three stages. Nominations opened March 2 and closed March 23, 2026. The voting round followed on May 4 and ran through May 18, 2026, after the leading nominees advanced from the nomination phase. Winners were announced July 12, 2026, once voting ended. That spacing, weeks between nominations closing and voting opening, and weeks more before the reveal, is the rhythm the program printed for 2026.

Because the program is annual, a 2027 cycle is the reasonable expectation, but the organizer has not yet printed a 2027 calendar, and the nomination and voting dates for the coming cycle remain unpublished; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The same holds for nominee eligibility details the 2026 pages did not carry forward. The live ballot is where a new round would appear first, and it is the authoritative source for the current cycle's dates.

How a supporter votes in the Lakeshore ballot today

The literal mechanic is simple and repeatable. While a voting round is active, a supporter loads the Lakeshore ballot at yourchoiceawards.com/manitowoc/, works through the category list, and picks a Lakeshore business or organization in each one. The program's stated rule is one vote per category per day while the round runs. That phrasing does two things at once: it caps a single day's ballot at one pick per category, and it explicitly invites the supporter back the next day, and every day after, until the round closes.

For a supporter, that shapes the habit. A nominee with an organized following is not carried by one big push but by people who remember to return on each day of the window. For 2026 that window was May 4-18, so a committed supporter had a fresh chance to back a favorite, in every category they cared about, on every day the round was open.

The ballot also rewards breadth. Voting in 25 or more categories puts a supporter in the draw for the $250 prize, which gives casual participants a reason to fill out long ballots rather than voting in one category and leaving. Nominations work the same way for newcomers: if a business is missing from the ballot, the nomination round, March 2-23 in 2026, is when supporters write it in, and the leading companies in each category then move ahead to the voting round.

How the Lakeshore ballot sits beside its Wisconsin neighbours

Manitowoc's program is one of several readers-choice ballots run across Wisconsin, and each answers to its own market. In Best of the Valley in Appleton, the same publisher family runs a Fox Cities ballot; Best of the Bay in Green Bay covers that market; and the Eau Claire Reader's Choice Awards serves Eau Claire.

The state's largest metros run their own, differently branded programs: Best of Milwaukee Readers' Choice and Best of Madison are the biggest readers-choice contests in Wisconsin, while Janesville CommunityVotes shows the smaller-market end of the range. What sets the Lakeshore ballot apart from all of them is its publisher tie: it is the Gannett paper's program for the Manitowoc area, with winners published in The Herald Times Reporter, and its $250 voter prize tied to voting in 25 or more categories.

For a business, that means the Lakeshore ballot is the one that matters to this market. A nomination or a win on the Manitowoc ballot carries weight with Lakeshore customers in a way a Milwaukee or Madison placement does not, and the wide category spread gives niche businesses a realistic path to a first-place finish that a statewide ballot rarely offers.

Strengthening support in the Lakeshore ballot

This program's mechanic favors steady outreach over a single announcement. Because supporters can vote once a day per category, a business that asks each customer on every day of the voting window multiplies its ballots without anyone breaking the rules. For 2026 that window was May 4-18, so the practical play was a reminder at the start of the round, a nudge mid-round, and a final push before May 18.

The voter prize is a tool worth naming to customers: voting in 25 or more categories enters them for the $250 draw, which gives them a personal reason to complete long ballots and to come back. The organizer's ballot page is also where its position on outside help would be stated; nothing in the program's published material spells out a policy on voting software or bulk voting, so a business with questions should read the rules there before acting. For a broader view of what works on daily-return ballots, see how to get more votes online, and for the service questions behind that search, buying award votes is covered separately.