Ay Restaurant Poll: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the AY Restaurant Poll is and who runs it

The AY Restaurant Poll is the restaurant edition of AY Magazine's readers' choice balloting, published from aymag.com for an Arkansas-wide audience. AY Magazine is a newspaper listed in the Arkansas Press Association's member directory, and aymag.com hosts the vote directly, with no third-party balloting service sitting between the reader and the form. The 2024 ballot lives at the vote-2024-ay-restaurant-poll address on aymag.com, and the page that carries it is titled "Nominations Open for 2024 AY Readers' Restaurant Poll." Its opening line asks a simple question: "Have a favorite Arkansas restaurant? Then make your voice heard!"

Classified as a best-of program with a public-vote mechanic, the ballot covers dining across the state. Unlike a chamber contest or a station giveaway, this ballot belongs to a magazine's editorial calendar, and the same publisher also runs AY's Best of Arkansas, a broader readers' choice program listed separately on this site. No city or county is attached to the program in its own materials, so this page treats Arkansas as the whole market and the magazine as the organizer.

The edition history and the 2024 window

The AY Restaurant Poll has confirmed editions in 2018, 2023 and 2024. The gaps between those years mean the poll has not run on an unbroken yearly schedule in its published history, even though the organizer describes the series as annual.

For the 2024 cycle the ballot page states the window directly: "The polls are now open for the 2024 AY Readers' Restaurant Poll," and "Voting ends January 5, 2024." That makes early January the close of the confirmed cycle, with nominations and voting live on the same page at the same time.

A later page on aymag.com describes the "sixth annual AY Readers' Restaurant Poll," and the publisher's 2025 results coverage tells readers to "not be surprised to find a new favorite haunt in the pages that follow," a hint at how wide the roster runs in the cycle the magazine most recently described in those terms.

The ballot page leaves out the exact opening day of the current edition, the year the next edition will run, and any eligibility terms for voters; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The month-level window is the only timing detail the ballot page itself carries, so plan around early January and treat anything more precise as something to read at the source.

How a supporter votes today

Voting takes only a few steps. A reader loads the ballot at aymag.com, finds the restaurant categories, and names favorites. The 2024 page combined two actions in one place: the headline announced that nominations were open, and the body text said the polls were already open, so a reader could nominate and vote in the same visit.

For day-to-day voting, the publisher's own guidance from its Best of 2026 materials is "Vote for your favorites once daily per category," which means a supporter who wants to maximize help for a restaurant returns each day and votes in every category that restaurant fits.

The full category roster for the restaurant poll is not printed on the ballot page itself, so supporters discover the exact list when the form loads. Because aymag.com hosts the ballot directly, no separate platform login appears in the publisher's materials; the ballot page is the whole process.

A supporter who wants to spread the word can pass the ballot link to diners who already visit the restaurant, and each of those diners follows the same daily routine. The ballot page prints no cap beyond the daily-per-category guidance and no eligibility terms beside it, so the practical rule a supporter can count on is the publisher's own: vote once daily, per category, while the polls are open.

How this ballot sits beside its Arkansas neighbours

Arkansas readers' choice season is crowded, and the AY Restaurant Poll is unusual in two ways. First, it is dining-focused: where most of its neighbours spread across dozens of business and lifestyle categories, this ballot is built around restaurants, at least as the 2024 page frames it. Second, the magazine both publishes and serves the vote from its own domain, so the look, the form and the rules all come from aymag.com itself.

Its closest neighbours on this site are the other Arkansas best-of programs, each answering to its own publisher: Best of the Grand Prairie from the Stuttgart Daily Leader, Arkansas Business Best of Biz, CommunityVotes Jonesboro, Arkansas Money & Politics Best of AMP, Best of the Best from the Russellville Courier, and Arkansas Times Best of Arkansas.

A supporter who lives in Jonesboro, for example, has both the CommunityVotes ballot and the statewide magazine polls available, and support given to one program does not transfer to the other. The same is true for the AY Restaurant Poll beside AY's Best of Arkansas, which the same publisher runs as a separate program with its own ballot. The links above let a reader compare windows, hosts and mechanics directly across the state's ballots.

Strengthening support for a restaurant on this ballot

Because the publisher's stated rule is a round of voting per person per day per category, the most effective legitimate push is a daily habit, not a single burst. A restaurant can ask its regulars to bookmark the aymag.com ballot and vote each morning while the polls are open, and remind them again mid-poll, since the confirmed 2024 window closed in early January.

The organizer's materials describe no outside-help rules for this poll specifically, so the safe reading is the publisher's own voting guidance: keep participation human and daily. A playbook that fits readers' choice ballots of this shape sits in how to get more votes online, and the wider question of paid support is covered on buying votes online along with its legality page. Any push should stay within what the ballot page itself allows for the cycle in question.