Bestofamp2023: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the AMP Best Of 2023 awards are and who runs them

The AMP Best Of 2023 awards are a best-of business recognition program for Arkansas, run by armoneyandpolitics.com, the publication behind Arkansas Money and Politics. The ballot page introduces the program as a celebration of the best businesses the state has to offer. Unlike a juried prize or a chamber gala, the selection is a public vote, so the businesses that come out ahead are the ones whose customers and supporters actually show up on the ballot and act.

The vote runs on the publication's own domain, with no outside balloting platform in between. In practical terms that means everything a supporter needs, from the category list to the submit step, lives on the AMP ballot page at armoneyandpolitics.com/bestofamp2023/, and the publication sets its own rules instead of inheriting a platform's fine print. The program covers many business categories at once rather than honoring a single winner in a single field, which is what the best-of format does.

Because the organizer is a statewide Arkansas publication rather than a city paper or a merchant association, the ballot is open to businesses across the state. No city is named as the program's home; the awards describe themselves in statewide terms. For a business deciding whether to take the ballot seriously, the right comparison is not a neighborhood poll but the other statewide Arkansas programs listed later on this page, several of which run on different publishers and different schedules.

Confirmed editions and the dates that matter for the current cycle

The confirmed run of the AMP Best Of 2023 program covers four editions: 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026. The 2023 ballot page was published by AMP Staff on August 11, 2023, and it carried the nomination round, which ran August 11 through August 25, 2023. That makes 2023 the starting point of the program as it can be traced on the publisher's own domain, with each later year adding another edition to the series.

The current cycle is anchored to a voting window of October 16 through October 25, 2026. That is the window a business should plan around if it intends to mobilize customers this fall, because it is the stretch in which votes actually count. Whether the current cycle's nomination round mirrors the 2023 pattern of an August window has not been printed alongside the voting dates, so a business that wants to be nominated as well as voted for should watch the publisher's site through the late summer.

A gap deserves plain language. AMP has not published the list of categories its Best of 2023 ballot uses, and it has not printed any rule on vote caps, one-vote-per-day limits or eligibility; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. A business that assumes last year's categories carried over, or that a daily limit does or does not exist, is guessing. The live ballot is the sole authority for what appears on it in a given cycle, and it is where any change in dates, categories or rules would surface first.

How a supporter votes on the AMP Best Of 2023 ballot

Voting in the AMP Best Of 2023 awards is a straightforward public vote, and the ballot mentions no purchase. A supporter who wants to back an Arkansas business starts at the ballot page on armoneyandpolitics.com, finds the business or category they want to recognize, and casts a vote. Because the ballot lives on the publication's own domain, there is no separate platform account to create and no third-party contest site to trust with the interaction; the publication runs the whole process itself.

What the ballot does not spell out is the fine print. Nothing in the page text states whether a supporter must register, whether votes can be cast repeatedly across the window, or whether the ballot accepts write-in entries alongside its listed categories. Those mechanics matter most to a business organizing a push, because a daily-return rule changes how a campaign is scheduled and how often the same customer can be asked. The AMP ballot keeps that fine print off its page, and the live form is where a supporter sees exactly what is asked of them.

Timing shapes the rest. The current voting window, October 16 through October 25, 2026, gives supporters a defined stretch to act rather than an open-ended poll. A business that waits until the final days compresses its own timeline, while a business that asks early gives each customer room to come back if the ballot allows repeat visits. Either way the required action is the same: open the AMP ballot, find the business, vote, and finish any confirmation step the page presents.

How the AMP ballot sits beside other Arkansas best-of programs

Arkansas businesses face no shortage of best-of ballots, and a business can easily be nominated in several programs in the same season. The closest relative is the ongoing Arkansas Money & Politics Best of AMP program, which is the same publisher's awards series in its current form; the 2023 page is an edition of that series, so a business nominated by AMP should treat the two pages as a single continuous program rather than two separate contests.

Around it sit programs run by other publishers. The Arkansas Business Best of Biz awards come from the state's business press, while the Arkansas Times Best of Arkansas represents the alternative weekly's readership. At the local level, the Best of the Grand Prairie program from the Stuttgart Daily Leader and the Best of the Best ballot from the Russellville Courier serve their own communities, and CommunityVotes Jonesboro runs a nominate-then-vote format for Jonesboro.

What distinguishes the AMP ballot is statewide reach combined with a business focus from a publication that covers money and politics. A restaurant in Jonesboro could plausibly appear in both CommunityVotes Jonesboro and the AMP ballot; a statewide contractor is a likelier AMP or Best of Biz nominee than a Stuttgart program entry. Every one of these ballots belongs to a different publisher, so support built for any of them does not transfer, and the windows and rules are set separately by each organizer.

Building support for an AMP Best Of 2023 nomination

Support in the AMP Best Of 2023 awards comes down to turning customers into voters inside a defined window. This ballot is a public vote run at armoneyandpolitics.com, so every vote a business receives has to come from someone willing to open the AMP page and act. The 2023 cycle paired a nomination round with the vote, which means the first task for any business is making sure it appears on the ballot under the name its customers recognize; the current cycle's voting window runs October 16 through October 25, 2026.

AMP has not printed a policy on outside help or voting software in its Best of 2023 ballot material, so the dependable approach is to ask real customers directly: email lists, counter signs, and social posts pointing at the AMP ballot. For tactics that go beyond asking, see the how to get more votes online guide, and for the broader legal position see whether buying votes is legal. No outside service, this site included, can promise first place in a public vote; what a business controls is how early and how clearly it asks.