The Bulletin Best of Bend Community Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

Two Bend ballots, same city, different newspapers

Bend already has one well-known readers'-choice program, Bend Magazine Readers' Choice Awards, so a supporter running a loose search for a Bend community vote could easily land on either one without realizing they're separate contests. The Bulletin, Bend's daily newspaper covering Central Oregon, runs its own ballot entirely apart from that: the 2026 CCA Best of Bend, hosted on Second Street at bulletin.secondstreetapp.com. The two share no judging, no combined tally, and no publisher.

Read the empty rows as gaps, not as answers to fill in with a guess. A rule that governs Bend Magazine's separate ballot has no bearing on this one; confirm whatever's needed directly on bulletin.secondstreetapp.com each cycle instead.

Two windows, both opening in April and closing in July

The 2025 edition ran April 16 through July 15. The 2026 edition opened April 13 and closed July 11, three days earlier at each end than the year before. Two data points land close together, but they're still only two; nothing published projects where a third edition's dates would fall.

Neither window separates a distinct nominating stage from a distinct voting stage on the public listing. A supporter submits a nomination and casts a vote inside the same open period, rather than waiting for one stage to close before the next begins. That single-stage shape held in both 2025 and 2026, though two years of consistency still isn't the same as a published rule guaranteeing it continues into a third.

What "Central Oregon" actually covers, and what it doesn't

The Bulletin describes itself as Bend's daily newspaper, serving Central Oregon. That's the extent of the geography attached to this ballot: Bend as the home city, Central Oregon as the wider coverage area the paper itself claims, and nothing more specific than that on the public listing.

No neighborhood breakdown and no list of towns beyond Bend appear on the confirmed page. A business or nominee from elsewhere in Central Oregon isn't obviously excluded by anything published, but confirming eligibility directly with The Bulletin is safer than assuming either way.

That gap matters more here than it might on a longer-running program, since a first-time entrant from just outside Bend has no past ruling to point to either. Treating "Bend" and "Central Oregon" as the two boundaries The Bulletin has actually named, rather than guessing at a third, keeps a nomination on solid ground until the paper says more.

Approaching a two-edition ballot without a long history to lean on

Two confirmed editions don't give a nominee years of past Bend winners to study before deciding how to campaign. The more dependable approach is finding people who would genuinely want to support the nomination, actual Bend readers, actual Central Oregon neighbors, and pointing them straight at bulletin.secondstreetapp.com rather than hoping a wider audience discovers it on its own.

Nowhere on the public listing does The Bulletin spell out its own view of a padded burst of votes, and guessing wrong about that costs a two-year-old ballot more standing than it would cost a program with a decade of Bend winners already behind it. Three pages fill in what this one leaves out: is buying votes legal marks where genuine reader outreach turns into something riskier, award-vote campaign planning breaks down how a community-choice format like Bend's typically gets run, and buying votes online explains what paid help for a public ballot generally covers, from timing to delivery.