At noon sharp on Thursday, October 31, the voting for Newtown’s Fifth Annual Scarecrow Contest closed. With 609 votes and 23 scarecrows to choose from, only three could win.

The winners were as follows: for “Most Original” was number 16, “Babies in Pajamas” by the Dunne Family; for “Fan Favorite” was number 42, “Australian Break Dancer” by Lauren Sexton, Lindsay Devito, and Emma Beets Griffin; and for “Newtown Pride” was number 91, “News Reporter on Duty” by Bee Publishing Company.

The voting this year was a little different than in years past. This year, voting was held on the platform SurveyMonkey.

Connor Negri, the assistant director of Parks & Rec, met with The Bee following the close of the contest. He said, “In the past, I’ve run events with voting and you run into two problems. One is it takes you two hours to hand count all the ballots … but we’ve also noticed … we would see groups of people coming in with stacks of votes and putting them in the bucket.” Negri added, “The great thing about doing it online…is that each IP address can only vote once.”

“It limits the amount of times people can vote,” Negri said, “which creates a more fair and even playing field for everybody to win. We felt that was a better way to go this year.”

He noted that there weren’t too many complaints about the way voting was done this year, but is looking for another platform to use next year. He said a limitation of the survey was that only ten pictures could be displayed for one question.

Parks & Rec is looking forward to next year’s contest, though, as it will be the first year they enter their own contest. “We’ve … had talk amongst the Parks crew and the Rec office of putting up our own scarecrow next year … We have not entered a scarecrow yet. It’ll be in the works for 2025,” Negri shared.

He also mentioned the addition of a themed category next year to see if people get “reenergized” about the contest.

Negri is looking forward to the contest next year as “it just really does make the environment of Fairfield Hills Campus so much more happy and fun and it really just connects us to fall. I’ve really enjoyed doing it.”

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Reporter Sam Cross can be reached at sam@thebee.com.