Mount Airy News Cutest Pet Contest: How Voting Works & How to Win

A photo goes up, the public votes: how Mount Airy's pet contest actually works

Mt Airy News runs the Cutest Pet Contest as a straightforward photo-and-vote format: an owner submits a picture of a pet, and from there the public simply picks a favorite. Six confirmed rounds have run this way, 2020 through 2025, each one carried on Second Street's technology at the address mtairynews.secondstreetapp.com.

Mount Airy sits in Surry County, in the northern Piedmont region of North Carolina, and Mt Airy News is the paper serving that county's readers. The most recent round opened October 22, 2025 and closed November 26, 2025, a five-week stretch consistent with how the paper has run the promotion in past years. Nothing published says whether that same five-week length will repeat for a seventh round, only that six rounds in a row have kept to roughly that pattern already.

The bottom two rows stay genuinely unsettled rather than filled in with a guess pulled from a different newspaper's pet contest. Confirm on the live ballot each cycle, since Mt Airy News has never printed either one for this program.

One pet gallery among several very different North Carolina ballots

North Carolina runs several other public-vote programs well outside Mt Airy News's own gallery, and each one works on a different mechanic. Some judge local businesses statewide; others score high school athletes week by week. None shares a results page, a judging method, or an owner with Mount Airy's pet photos.

Why the difference in format actually matters here

A supporter used to a business ballot, where a company simply gets nominated once, might expect the same from a pet contest. Mount Airy's version instead depends on a photo actually being uploaded first; there is nothing to vote on until an owner submits one. That single distinction shapes almost everything else about how a push for votes here has to work.

Mount Airy, Surry County, and what else Mt Airy News runs on the same platform

Mount Airy sits in Surry County, North Carolina, and the Cutest Pet Contest is only one of several promotions Mt Airy News hosts on the same Second Street platform. Nothing on the contest page draws a stricter boundary than that; a photo and a public vote are what the format itself asks for.

Mt Airy News runs other promotions through the same platform beyond the pet contest, among them a grocery sweepstakes, a trivia quiz, a home-improvement sweepstakes, and its own Mountie Awards ballot. None of those share a category list, a per-voter cap, or a nomination window with the Cutest Pet Contest; each keeps its own separate schedule under the same organizer.

A pet owner asking friends and family to vote is rarely asking only people who live inside Mount Airy's own city limits, which is worth keeping in mind when deciding how widely to share a photo's link. Surry County readers who already follow Mt Airy News for its other promotions are exactly the audience a narrow, in-town-only request would miss entirely.

Getting real votes on a photo, not just uploads

A photo needs a genuine audience before it needs anything else, and that separates this gallery from a business ballot where a company simply waits to be recognized. Uploading a clear picture is only the opening move; from there, the tally depends entirely on how many actual people click through and vote, which favors direct outreach over one broad post hoping strangers stumble onto it.

Asking the same people more than once, across the full five-week window rather than only near the close, tends to outperform a single announcement. Second Street watches every gallery it hosts for irregular voting patterns, and a contest with six straight confirmed years behind it has more standing to lose than a first-year entry would.

Whether an entry actually wins is a separate question Mt Airy News alone settles once voting closes; getting real people to look at a photo is the part within an entrant's own control. is buying votes legal lays out what keeps a vote-getting push compliant, and photo-contest vote strategy is built specifically around a submission-and-vote format like this gallery's own.