San Angelo Community's Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

A Gannett-domain Second Street ballot, not a magazine's own poll

San Angelo Standard-Times runs the San Angelo Community's Choice Awards on Second Street, the ballot platform whose address here reads gosanangelo.gannettcontests.com. That domain sets it apart from a magazine-run "best of" poll built on its own custom site; San Angelo's ballot instead follows the same platform shape a large newspaper chain uses across many of its markets.

Three editions are confirmed so far: 2024, 2025 and 2026. The 2026 cycle's own window is the most precisely dated of the three, running August 7 through August 22, 2026, and the listing now shows that window closed. A separate address exists for the program's nominations stage, distinct from the ballot page itself, though its own opening and closing dates are not published the way the August window is.

Read that last row for what it is: how many categories run, and how often one person may vote, is not stated; confirm on the live ballot each cycle rather than assuming a figure from a different Gannett paper's own ballot.

Six other Texas metros, six separate publishers

San Angelo's ballot sits alongside several other Texas readers'-choice programs this site also covers, and every one of them answers to its own separate operator. Best of Austin Readers Poll, Best of Dallas Readers' Choice, Best of El Paso, Best of Houston and Best of San Antonio each cover a different metro under a publisher unconnected to San Angelo Standard-Times, and Fort Worth Magazine runs Best of Fort Worth entirely on its own.

None of those six overlaps with San Angelo's own ballot in who judges it, where results post, or how categories break down, whatever platform each one happens to run on. A San Angelo business that wins here holds a title specific to San Angelo; it settles nothing about a listing in any of the six larger metros above, and the reverse holds equally true.

Three years of an August window, and what stays open past it

San Angelo Standard-Times has kept its Community's Choice Awards running for three confirmed years, 2024 through 2026, each with its own dated Second Street listing. The 2026 cycle's window, August 7 through August 22, is the clearest picture available of how the format is timed, though nothing confirmed states that a future cycle will land on those exact same dates again.

What that three-year pattern does not settle is a category breakdown for the ballot, a stated ceiling on repeat voting by the same supporter, or whether entering costs a business anything. San Angelo Standard-Times keeps all three details off the page, so a business or reader leaning on a figure from a different Gannett-run ballot elsewhere in Texas is working from the wrong source; confirm on the live ballot each cycle instead of assuming continuity where none is stated.

The alternate addresses tied to this program hint at the shape of the format even where exact rules stay unpublished: a nominations page precedes the ballot, and a separate winners page follows it once results are set. That three-stage structure, nominate, vote, then announce, repeats across all three confirmed years, 2024, 2025 and 2026, even though the specific day-to-day mechanics inside each stage are not spelled out on any of those pages.

Building genuine support for a San Angelo listing

Because the ballot itself does not publish a vote cap or a category structure, the most reliable path for a San Angelo business is asking real, local customers to visit gosanangelo.gannettcontests.com directly during the confirmed window and search for the business by its own name. Following up with those same customers again before August 22 tends to matter more than the size of any single push near the close.

A newspaper chain running the same Second Street format across many markets typically has its own systems for catching irregular activity, even where the specific rules for San Angelo are not spelled out publicly. Is buying votes legal is worth reading before spending real money chasing a spot on this ballot, and building real momentum for an online ballot covers approaches suited to a newspaper-run readers'-choice program like San Angelo's specifically, rather than a small blog contest or a paid-vote charity fundraiser.