Best of Story County Community's Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

Ames Tribune's Story County ballot: the confirmed facts

The Best of Story County Community's Choice Awards is Ames Tribune's readers'-choice ballot for Story County, Iowa, built on the Second Street platform and hosted at amestrib.gannettcontests.com. Ames Tribune organizes every confirmed edition itself, and the format stays simple: businesses go on the ballot, and the public votes. That basic shape has now repeated four times, with the earliest confirmed edition dated 2023 and the newest closing its voting window on August 18, 2026.

How many categories run, and how often one person may vote, is not stated; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Ames Tribune has left that gap open across all four confirmed editions, not only the most recent one.

Four cycles, one detail that still has not changed

Ames Tribune's ballot first ran in 2023, resurfaced the two years after that, and just closed its fourth cycle in August 2026. Reaching four consecutive years is enough to call the format itself dependable, even though the fine print, a category roster, a per-voter rule, how close results get settled, has still not surfaced in anything Ames Tribune has published.

Timing has held roughly steady too: the 2026 window opened August 3 and ran through August 18, landing in the same late-summer stretch as earlier cycles, though the exact dates shift a little year over year.

Ames Tribune's Second Street account stays busy well beyond this one ballot: 321 other promotions run alongside it, ranging from trivia quizzes to travel sweepstakes. That crowded hub is exactly why typing amestrib.gannettcontests.com's exact ballot address matters more than searching generally; a loosely worded search for Ames Tribune's contests might land on any one of those other 321 listings instead.

None of that changes what a Story County business still cannot find in print: a fixed category structure and a per-voter limit stay absent across all four editions alike. Whatever governs the fifth cycle belongs on amestrib.gannettcontests.com once Ames Tribune publishes it, not on a guess borrowed from a different Iowa ballot.

Six Iowa ballots, including this one, that do not share a website

Story County's ballot answers only to Ames Tribune. Its results carry no weight toward five other Iowa readers'-choice programs that follow a broadly similar nominate-then-vote shape but sit under separate publishers, separate platforms, and separate coverage areas entirely.

Running a campaign across several of these programs at once does not merge the outcomes into one. Each program listed above names its own organizer, sets its own calendar, and decides its own winners without any tie to Story County's results.

Building support around a closed window, not a guessed reopening

amestrib.gannettcontests.com's 2026 window closed August 18, and Ames Tribune has not printed a date for whatever cycle follows it. Four straight confirmed editions make a fifth appearance likely, though nothing here turns that likelihood into a promise; checking amestrib.gannettcontests.com itself beats assuming next year's dates will mirror this year's exactly. A business that waited until the last days of the 2026 window to start asking for support learned a lesson four confirmed editions already spell out: a fifth cycle, whenever it opens, rewards planning ahead of the date rather than reacting to it.

A ballot like Story County's responds to real customers asked again, not to one reminder sent right before its window closes. Reading whether buying votes crosses a legal line makes sense before committing real budget to a fifth Story County run, the readers'-choice campaign playbook walks through a ballot shaped exactly like this one, and the overview of paid vote support covers what outside help generally involves once amestrib.gannettcontests.com opens its next window.

Whatever that fifth edition ends up requiring, a category list, a per-voter rule, an exact opening date, none of it exists yet in what Ames Tribune has confirmed. The live ballot page, once it updates, is the place that answer will actually show up first.