Best of Havasu: How Voting Works & How to Win

An independent ballot in a state where CommunityVotes runs several

Four of the six other Arizona programs tied to this page answer to the CommunityVotes network. Best of Havasu does not. River City Newspapers runs it on its own, hosted at havasunews.secondstreetapp.com, covering Lake Havasu City rather than any of the Phoenix-area suburbs CommunityVotes serves in this state.

That independence shows up in how the ballot is built, too. Rather than the shared template CommunityVotes markets tend to follow, Best of Havasu is one entry among many on River City Newspapers' own Second Street account, sitting alongside sweepstakes and other seasonal promotions the publisher runs throughout the year for the same Lake Havasu City readership.

The 2026 edition, the fourth confirmed one, opened June 15, 2026 and closed August 1, 2026. Going back to the first confirmed edition in 2023, River City Newspapers has kept the ballot on a similar mid-summer schedule each year, though a category breakdown and a per-voter rule have never appeared on the page in any of those four cycles.

Six Arizona ballots, one independent and five under other names

River City Newspapers' own Second Street account has listed 61 separate promotions over the years, sweepstakes and surveys included, alongside Best of Havasu itself. Comparing that against the other Arizona programs named on this site shows how the ownership actually splits.

What the split means for a Lake Havasu City entry

Placing well in Best of Havasu does nothing for standing in any CommunityVotes market, and the reverse holds too, since each keeps a fully separate results page. A shopper searching a generic "best of Arizona" phrase could just as easily surface Chandler's or Tempe's ballot as Havasu's own; only havasunews.secondstreetapp.com confirms which program a visitor has actually reached.

Four summers of confirmed dates, and what stays unconfirmed anyway

The full listing history for this ballot spans September 17, 2023 through August 1, 2026, covering all four confirmed editions. Each one has landed somewhere between early summer and August, with the most recent running June 15 to August 1, 2026. River City Newspapers has not yet posted anything for a fifth cycle, expected sometime in 2027.

A repeated summer pattern across four years still is not a published rule. Nothing on havasunews.secondstreetapp.com commits the organizer to opening on the same week annually, and no stage beyond that single window, a runoff, a finalist round, appears anywhere in what the platform lists for Best of Havasu.

That gap matters more for a program with a shorter history than a longer one. A ballot with only four confirmed cycles has not yet settled into the kind of predictable calendar that a decade of editions might eventually produce, so treating June 15 through August 1 as this year's fact rather than a permanent rule keeps expectations honest heading into 2027.

Supporting a Lake Havasu City business inside a short summer window

Four confirmed editions still leave the two details that matter most to a live campaign unanswered: what the category breakdown looks like, and whether one household could cast more than a single vote. Treating each new cycle as its own unknown, rather than assuming last summer's format repeats exactly, is the safer starting point.

Contacting actual Lake Havasu City customers directly, and following up before the window closes, does more for a nomination than one wide announcement ever does. Traffic that reads as automated puts an entry at risk regardless of which edition number it happens to be, and a program only four cycles deep has less cushion to absorb that kind of flag than one with a decade of confirmed history behind it. is buying votes legal covers the distinction between genuine outreach and a substitute for it, and award-vote campaign planning addresses a readers'-choice ballot with this exact single-window shape.