Prescott Readers' Choice (Prescott Daily Courier): How Voting Works & How to Win

One window, not two: what's actually confirmed for Prescott's ballot

Some readers'-choice programs split nomination and voting into separate stages, weeks or months apart. Prescott Readers' Choice does not. The Prescott Daily Courier runs both inside a single window on dcourier.secondstreetapp.com, and for 2026 that window opened March 2 and closed May 23, already finished by the time this page tracked it in September 2026.

Two editions back that pattern: 2025 and 2026 are both confirmed, making Prescott a newer entry among the Courier's public-vote programs rather than a decade-old fixture. A 2027 edition is expected, though nothing published pins that date to March specifically.

How many categories run, and how often one person may vote, is not stated; confirm on the live ballot each cycle rather than assuming this year's silence on those two points was an accident.

A Prescott Daily Courier ballot, not a shared statewide network

Prescott Readers' Choice belongs to the Prescott Daily Courier alone. It sits on the Second Street platform, the same software several other outlets license, but the results, the rules, and the judging are the Courier's own, not shared with any other Arizona publisher.

A strong Prescott nomination buys nothing on any of those five: separate judges, separate ballots, separate winners lists. The Courier itself keeps a second program going too, the Courier Cares Christmas Lighting Contest, run on its own schedule and never folded into Readers' Choice despite sharing a newsroom.

Why that separation matters for a search-driven visit

Typing "Prescott best of" into a search bar carries a real chance of surfacing a CommunityVotes city page before dcourier.secondstreetapp.com itself shows up. Only the March-to-May window and the two confirmed editions are locked in for Prescott's own ballot; a category list, the exact 2027 dates, and any per-voter rule all stay unpublished until the Courier posts them directly.

Second Street is the software vendor behind the ballot page itself, not the organizer. The Prescott Daily Courier licenses that platform the way a number of local publishers do, then supplies its own program name, its own window, and its own rules on top of it. Sharing a vendor with another city's ballot never means sharing that city's categories, cap, or results, so a detail borrowed from a different Second Street page is a guess about Prescott, not a fact about it.

Prescott's own results, without a wider Arizona claim attached

Prescott is the only city dcourier.secondstreetapp.com names for this program, and nothing on the page extends that reach to a metro area or a surrounding region. No neighboring-town list appears anywhere in what the Courier has published for this ballot.

A business reading the coverage label should take it at face value: Prescott. Nothing published widens that further, so treating the result as a Prescott-specific honor, not a regional one, matches what the Courier itself states. A shop just outside the city limits is left to decide for itself whether entering makes sense, since the page neither invites nor rules out a nearby business explicitly.

Working inside a single, already-closed window

Because 2026 is already closed, there is no live action to take on this ballot right now beyond watching for the 2027 window to open. A program with only two prior editions has less momentum built up than an older one, so the smarter move is leaning on the shoppers a business already has.

Ask them more than once once nominations reopen, rather than one reminder sent close to whatever the eventual deadline turns out to be. A newer ballot like this draws more scrutiny toward a sudden burst of activity than a program with years of established patterns behind it, so pacing outreach across the window matters here specifically.

A campaign built on real, repeated turnout is also the one that stays clearly inside what the law actually allows for a public vote, worth reading before committing budget to Prescott's third edition. A Prescott business weighing outside help can compare notes on how a paid vote-support order actually gets fulfilled against what planning a readers'-choice campaign from scratch tends to involve, since the two questions do not always have the same answer.