Arkansas Times Best of Arkansas: How Voting Works & How to Win

Thirty years of the same statewide question

Arkansas Times has run Best of Arkansas long enough to hit a 30th year in 2025. That's not a small milestone for a regional alt-weekly. Three decades of the same annual ask, tell readers what they think is best in Arkansas, builds a kind of institutional muscle memory that a brand-new local poll simply doesn't have yet.

The 2026 finals ballot is live now, which places this guide squarely inside an active cycle rather than a dormant one. Two web addresses matter here and they aren't interchangeable. vote.arktimes.com is where the actual voting happens. Arktimes.com/best-of-arkansas is the magazine's own hub, carrying program history and archived results rather than a live form.

Three things Arkansas Times hasn't put in writing for this cycle: an exact close date, a per-day vote cap, or a full list of every category on the current ballot. Rather than guess any of those, treat vote.arktimes.com as the only live authority for the current cycle. For the state's other newspaper-run readers-choice programs, see the Arkansas contest hub.

A ballot that runs on restaurants, not retail

Food and restaurant categories carry more weight on this ballot than they do on a typical citywide best-of program. Entertainment and arts sections sit alongside them, giving the whole thing an alt-weekly's usual bent toward dining, nightlife, and culture over, say, insurance agents or auto shops. That's a structural fact worth knowing before a business assumes its category is a small afterthought.

Why "Best of the Rest" exists at all

Not every nominee fits neatly into food, entertainment, or arts. Arkansas Times' answer is a catch-all "Best of the Rest" category, the kind of slot a daily paper's more buttoned-up readers-choice ballot rarely bothers building. It signals something about the publication's own personality: an alt-weekly that would rather build a home for the odd, hard-to-classify local favorite than force it into a category that doesn't fit.

A restaurant entering here competes in the ballot's deepest, most crowded section. A business with no obvious category home shouldn't assume it's shut out; "Best of the Rest" is built for that exact gap.

The finals ballot is live, and the two URLs aren't interchangeable

vote.arktimes.com is the address that actually casts a vote. That's worth repeating because arktimes.com/best-of-arkansas, the magazine's program hub, is easy to confuse with it, and a link to the wrong one sends a supporter somewhere informative but useless for casting an actual vote.

The 2026 finals ballot being live means the nomination round already happened and narrowed the field. A campaign message written for the nomination phase, "help us get nominated", is stale once finals voting opens; the correct ask becomes a direct one, naming the category and pointing straight at the finalist's vote.arktimes.com listing.

General mechanics behind any readers-choice push are covered at how online contest votes work, and food or restaurant nominees specifically may find the restaurant vote campaign guide useful for pacing reminders around a food-heavy ballot like this one.

Little Rock roots, statewide framing

Arkansas Times is long associated with Little Rock and the Central Arkansas market, North Little Rock, Conway, Benton, Bryant, Jacksonville, Sherwood, and Maumelle sit inside or near that same metro footprint. The program itself is named and framed as a statewide award, not a Little Rock-only one, but the publication's home base is worth knowing when a business outside Central Arkansas is deciding how much reach to expect.

A 30-year run built mostly around one metro's alt-weekly readership behaves differently than a program that started statewide from year one. That doesn't mean a Fayetteville or Jonesboro business can't compete, categories aren't described here as regionally restricted, but it does mean confirming on vote.arktimes.com that a given category is actively drawing votes from outside Central Arkansas is a reasonable step before betting a campaign budget on it.

For businesses weighing a statewide alt-weekly ballot against a narrower regional one, the Best of River Valley and Best of Northeast Arkansas programs cover the Fort Smith/Russellville and Jonesboro regions specifically, each with its own ballot and its own publisher.

Campaigning honestly on a food-heavy, 30-year-old ballot

No fake accounts, no automated tools, and no "winner" claim before arktimes.com/best-of-arkansas actually publishes that year's result. A program running its 30th year has presumably seen every version of a manipulated campaign already, and a small business risks more reputational damage than upside by cutting that corner on a ballot this established.

Real customer outreach, a mention at checkout, a direct link in an email or text, a social post naming the exact category, does more on a crowded food-and-restaurant ballot than one generic "vote for us" push. Because entertainment and arts categories draw a different, often younger and culture-focused readership than the food side, tailoring the ask to the actual category audience matters more here than on a single-category contest.

Vote-promotion services, including ours, can help a business reach people who already know and like it, pointed at the correct vote.arktimes.com listing. None can guarantee a finals result on a ballot this size and this old. Read is buying votes legal before committing any budget, and see award-style vote campaign guidance for the general approach that applies across a readers-choice program like this one.