WTVQ Viewers' Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

Six years of the same audience ballot, run by a television station rather than a magazine

WTVQ-TV, Lexington, Kentucky's ABC affiliate known on air as ABC 36, has kept its Viewers' Choice Awards running for six confirmed editions, 2021 through 2026. Few local-audience ballots in this corner of Kentucky can point to that many straight years, and this one comes from a broadcaster's viewer relationship rather than a magazine's reader base or a chamber-of-commerce membership list.

The ballot itself sits on Second Street, a platform many local television stations use for their own polls, at abc36.secondstreetapp.com. The 2026 edition ran March 1 through May 1 and has since closed, with nominating and voting combined into that single window rather than split into two separate stages.

Six straight editions is a real signal that WTVQ intends to keep running this ballot, even while the specific rules stay thin. Confirm on the live ballot each cycle for anything past what that table shows, since a station's own page, not a summary written elsewhere, is the only place those particular gaps ever actually get filled in.

One combined ballot, not a two-stage nominate-then-vote format

Second Street lists this program under a ballot type that folds nominating and voting into a single stretch, rather than opening one window for nominations and a separate later window for voting. That shapes how a supporter should approach it: there isn't a first deadline and then a second one to track, just the one span, March 1 through May 1 for the 2026 edition.

Once that window shuts, WTVQ's page goes quiet until the next cycle opens, the same pattern six straight years suggests will repeat, though nothing published fixes an exact date for it in advance.

Why the platform, not just the station, matters to a supporter

Second Street runs audience ballots for stations well beyond Lexington, so a generic search risks turning up a different market's page entirely, or an older WTVQ address from a prior year. abc36.secondstreetapp.com is the address tied to the current cycle; treat any other version cautiously until it's confirmed live.

Kentucky's other "best of" names, and where WTVQ's own ballot sits apart

Kentucky carries several separate readers'-choice and best-of programs, none of them run by WTVQ or hosted on Second Street. A strong showing on WTVQ's ballot changes nothing about standing in any of these.

Even the program sharing WTVQ's own city, Best of Lexington KY, answers to a wholly different organizer and a wholly different platform. A business weighing several of these Kentucky programs at once is managing separate campaigns with separate deadlines, not one push that happens to touch the same city twice.

Building support around a window that has closed, with an eye on the next one

The 2026 stretch has run its course, so a reader arriving now is really scouting whatever cycle WTVQ opens next, leaning on six straight years of history as the strongest sign a new one is coming. Keeping an eye on abc36.secondstreetapp.com itself beats betting that March 1 repeats to the day.

Once a window does open, the same principle that applies to any Second Street ballot applies here: genuine viewers, contacted more than a single time, are what actually shifts a result. A station running six consecutive editions has had years to notice irregular activity, and a flag against that kind of history carries real weight, not just a lost entry but a harder look at future submissions too.

Getting nominated and actually winning stay two separate outcomes; WTVQ alone decides the second, on its own schedule. Is buying votes legal lays that distinction out clearly before any budget goes toward a future WTVQ push. Buying votes online covers how outside support for this kind of audience ballot typically works, and award-vote campaign planning fits a readers'-choice format shaped exactly like this one.