Plainsman's Choice: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes in Plainsman's Choice and why it exists

Plainsman's Choice is the best-of awards program run by The Auburn Plainsman, the newspaper based in Auburn, Alabama. The ballot sits in a dedicated section of theplainsman.com, and it is a plain public vote: readers of the paper pick their favorites and the staff publishes the results. The metro it serves is Auburn-Opelika, and the vertical is best-of, meaning local places, events and activities rather than a single photo or entry contest.

The paper's own description is worth quoting in full: "Each year, the Plainsman's Choice awards highlight the best places, events and activities in Auburn." That sentence, printed on the ballot page, is the clearest statement of who the program is for. The audience is the paper's readership in Auburn and the surrounding Auburn-Opelika metro, and the categories follow campus and community life in that market rather than a statewide field.

Because the publisher runs both the ballot and the site it sits on, everything a supporter needs is in one place. No outside contest service stands between the reader and the vote, no separate results site exists, and no sponsor page stands in for the paper. The table below lists what the paper has fixed about the program.

The dated record: which Plainsman's Choice editions are confirmed

Four editions of Plainsman's Choice are confirmed: 2022, 2023, 2025 and 2026. The paper describes the program as annual, and the 2026 coverage on theplainsman.com introduced the year's winners in the best of campus section, written by the Plainsman staff. No edition is confirmed for 2024, so the run should be read as four confirmed years rather than an unbroken streak.

The clearest dated fact about the voting window comes from the 2023 cycle, which fell in April. A category article on the Best Place to Get a Haircut in the 2023 edition is dated April 12 of that year, which places the live ballot squarely inside that month. No other cycle's month is printed on the section page, so April is a fact about 2023 specifically, not a promise about every year.

Several facts about the cycle are simply not published. The Plainsman has not printed the day the April window opens or closes, so confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The paper also publishes no nomination round dates and no advance calendar for the next edition. What is fixed is the section page itself: whenever a new cycle opens, the ballot appears at theplainsman.com under the Plainsman's Choice heading, and the paper promotes it through its regular coverage.

How a supporter votes on the Plainsman's Choice ballot

The mechanic is stated on the ballot page in the paper's own words: "Vote below for your best-of for each category. One answer for each category." That is the whole published rule. A supporter scrolls the ballot, picks a favorite in each category they want to answer, and submits on the same page. There is no separate nomination round printed on the section page and no second stage described anywhere on it.

The categories visible on the section page give a sense of the field. Phrases printed there include Best of Campus, Best of Community, Best of Food, Best Shopping, Best Student Event, Best On Campus Dining, Best Student Organization, Best Food Truck and Best Female Athlete. These are phrases the page itself carries, not an official complete roster, and the paper's coverage shows the mix spans campus life, local food and shopping, and Auburn athletics.

What the page does not state is just as relevant. It sets no eligibility rule for who may vote, prints no daily return limit, and gives no figure for how many categories a full ballot carries. A supporter who wants certainty on any of those points has to read the live ballot during the cycle, because the section page between cycles carries none of it.

Where Plainsman's Choice sits among Alabama's best-of ballots

Best-of ballots are common across Alabama, and Plainsman's Choice is the campus-anchored member of that group. Its neighbours each belong to a different publisher serving a different city, so support earned in one program means nothing in the others. The nearest comparison by shape is a readers-choice ballot run by a local paper; the nearest by geography is the cluster of Birmingham and northern Alabama programs.

On this site those neighbours are About Town's Best of Birmingham, AIA Birmingham People's Choice, CommunityVotes Huntsville, Decatur Daily Best Of The Best, Alabama Magazine's Best of Bama and the Anniston Star Readers' Choice Awards. Each is a best-of ballot for its own Alabama market, run under its own publisher's rules.

What sets Plainsman's Choice apart is the host. Every other program in this list is run by a publication or organization covering a city or region at large, while this one is run by the Auburn paper about its own campus and community, with categories such as Best On Campus Dining and Best Student Event that only a campus market would carry. Its ballot also lives inside theplainsman.com instead of a shared contest service, which keeps the whole cycle, from ballot to results coverage, on the paper's own domain.

Strengthening support for a Plainsman's Choice nominee

Doing well in this ballot rests on the printed mechanic: one answer for each category, from people who know Auburn. A business or student organization hoping to place should start with the audience the paper already serves, its readers in Auburn and the Auburn-Opelika metro. Share the Plainsman's Choice section link directly, name the categories a supporter can honestly answer, and ask while the April window is live rather than after it closes.

The section page sets no published rule on outside help, so the honest position is that nothing on the ballot prohibits coordinated outreach and nothing permits a specific method either. Keep pushes personal and verifiable: a salon asking its clients, a food truck asking its lunch crowd. The broader playbook at how to get more votes online applies to public votes of this shape, and the service pages for award ballots describe the general options without promising any result.