Westerly Sun Cutest Pets Contest: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who actually runs this ballot, and where it lives

The Westerly Sun, the daily newspaper covering Westerly, Rhode Island, publishes its Cutest Pets Contest through RI Media Group's account on the Second Street voting platform. The page sits at westerlysun.secondstreetapp.com, under a year-stamped web address for each round: 2025, 2021 and 2017 are the three years a working listing has been confirmed there.

The format itself is simple. A pet owner submits a photo, other visitors browse the gallery and vote for a favorite, and the newspaper's own masthead, printed at 100 Main Street in Westerly, stands behind the result. The contest sits inside a wider set of Second Street promotions RI Media Group runs for the paper's readers, alongside separate ballots built for local businesses rather than pets.

No published roster of categories and no daily-vote rule exist on that page; confirm on the live ballot each cycle, since nothing printed there settles the question either way.

Three confirmed years, not one unbroken streak

2017 is the earliest year a working listing has been found for this contest, opening around July 10 of that year on its own dedicated address. The contest then reappears in 2021, and again for the round that opened March 20, 2025 and closed April 11, 2025. Whatever ran, if anything, in the years between those three dates is not shown on the current page, so treat the history as three confirmed years rather than an unbroken annual run.

That pattern matters for a pet owner deciding whether to enter. A newspaper contest with three confirmed years behind it carries real history, yet that history is not dense enough to promise a fixed calendar slot every spring. The safer assumption is that RI Media Group opens a new round on its own schedule, not on a fixed anniversary of March 20.

2017, 2021 and 2025 sit spaced apart rather than back to back, which could describe a contest the newspaper revives on some quieter cycle of its own, or it could simply reflect how few years happen to have a working listing preserved. Either reading is guesswork; the only way to know what happens after 2025 is to watch westerlysun.secondstreetapp.com itself for whatever the Westerly Sun decides to post next.

One of several ballots this publisher runs, not the town's only vote

RI Media Group's westerlysun.secondstreetapp.com account carries more than this single pet contest. The same account also lists Call & Times Community Choice, a separate readers'-choice ballot for local businesses that opened July 18, 2026 and stayed open through September 14, 2026, plus a Reader's Choice ballot and an SRI/IND Readers' Choice ballot, both opening July 16, 2026 and closing the same September 14, 2026. None of those three business ballots is the pet contest covered on this page, and a strong showing in one carries no weight in another.

Best of Rhode Island, covered separately on this site, is a further separate statewide ballot, unconnected to the Westerly Sun's pet contest and to its own category list. A Westerly business owner chasing a business award and a Westerly pet owner entering a photo are, in practice, working entirely separate pages, even where both eventually land on a Second Street style ballot.

A pet owner's actual to-do list before spending any effort

Since the most recently confirmed round already closed April 11, 2025, checking whether a new round has opened is the first move, not assuming one exists purely because 2025 had one. westerlysun.secondstreetapp.com itself, not this page, is the only place that would show a fresh listing.

Whenever a round is open, asking real friends, family and neighbors to visit the gallery and vote, more than once before the deadline, is what actually moves a photo up a public leaderboard. This contest never spells out a cap on repeat votes or a ceiling on entries per household, so a number a friend repeats secondhand carries no more weight than a guess; confirm on the live ballot each cycle before promising a supporter anything specific.

Getting a photo entered only starts the process; the newspaper settles the winner once its own count finishes. is buying votes legal walks through the difference between a campaign built on real supporters and one built on shortcuts, and building real momentum for an online ballot sticks to outreach a page like this one has never had reason to discourage.