Best of SoCal: How Voting Works & How to Win

What Best of SoCal is and who runs it

Best of SoCal is the readers choice awards program published by the Santa Monica Daily Press, a California newspaper whose 2026 masthead carries a copyright line for Newlon Rouge LLC. The ballot is published at smdp.com under the best-of-socal-contest path, hosted by the newspaper itself with no outside voting platform in between, and questions about the program go to [email protected]. The market it covers is Southern California, and the invitation on the page asks readers to nominate the best businesses, people, and places in the region.

The vertical is best-of: a broad local ballot rather than a single-industry poll. The 2026 page carries a wide slate of categories, and the names visible on it lean heavily toward food and drink, among them Best Mexican Restaurant, Best Italian Restaurant, Best Japanese, Best Thai Restaurant, Best New Restaurant for places opened since 2024, Best Local Chef, Best Food Truck, Best Farmers Market, and Best Bar / Cocktail Bar. Those are the names printed on the page; the newspaper has not published a written statement that the list is exhaustive, so a business hunting for its exact category should read the live form rather than assume.

For a supporter or a nominated business weighing whether to take part, the table gathers the fixed details in one place.

The dated record for the 2026 cycle

Two editions of Best of SoCal are confirmed: 2024 and 2026. That pair is the reason Best of SoCal counts as an annual program, and the next expected run falls in 2027. No edition year between those two appears in the documented history, so any claim about a continuous yearly streak would go beyond what is documented.

The 2026 cycle is split into named phases. Phase 1 is the nomination period, now open when the page was read, running from June 10 to July 4, 2026. Phase 2 is finalist voting, running from July 5 through July 31, 2026. The page's own wording on the handover is direct: "After the nomination period closes July 4, our team will tally all submissions." Phase 3 is the winners announcement, and there the page stops short: it names the phase but prints no date for it, so the announcement timing is something to confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Two practical consequences follow from this shape. A business that wants to appear among the finalists has to collect nominations inside the June window, because the tally happens immediately after July 4. And a supporter who arrives at the ballot in August will find neither phase open, since the printed calendar ends with the July 31 close of finalist voting.

How a supporter votes on the Best of SoCal ballot

Voting on the Best of SoCal ballot is a plain public action on a form the newspaper controls. During Phase 1, a supporter opens the ballot, chooses a category, and submits a nomination for a business, person, or place. The printed rule is one ballot per person per day during the nomination period, which makes the daily return the core habit of the program: a supporter who wants to push several favorites, or repeat a favorite across days, comes back on separate days rather than submitting repeatedly at once.

Eligibility is stated narrowly. Employees of the Santa Monica Daily Press and their immediate family members are not eligible to vote. Beyond that exclusion the page prints no residency or readership test, so the practical gatekeeper is the daily ballot rule itself.

Phase 2 changes what the form asks for. From July 5 through July 31, 2026, the supporter is no longer nominating from scratch but choosing among the finalists the paper's team tallied after the July 4 close. The same ballot page carries both phases, so the address a supporter bookmarked in June is the address that matters in July. One point the page leaves open is whether the finalist round carries its own frequency rule; the one-ballot-per-person-per-day wording is tied to the nomination period, and no separate finalist rule is printed.

How Best of SoCal sits beside its California neighbours

Best of SoCal is one of several best-of ballots tracked in California, and its neighbours help show what makes it distinct. The sibling programs are Best of Central Valley Business, Best of Marin, Best of Orange County, Best of San Diego & Best Restaurants, Best of Silicon Valley, and the Best of North State Community's Choice Awards. Every one of those runs under a different publisher with a calendar of its own, and none of them shares the Santa Monica Daily Press masthead.

The differences are mostly about scope and host. Best of SoCal is anchored to a single newspaper's readership in Southern California, with Santa Monica as the paper's home city, while programs such as Best of Orange County or Best of Silicon Valley take their identity from a region rather than a publication. The Central Valley and North State ballots cover parts of the state far from the coast, and Best of Marin serves the Bay Area's northern counties. A business deciding where to spend outreach effort should treat these as separate campaigns with separate rules, because a nomination on one ballot carries no weight on another.

What Best of SoCal offers that a region-named ballot does not is a two-phase structure printed in full on its own page, with dated windows for both nominations and finalist voting, which makes planning around it unusually straightforward.

Strengthening support within the ballot's own rules

The ballot's mechanic rewards consistency, not volume in a single sitting. Because the paper allows one ballot per person per day during the nomination period, the most effective legitimate push is a reminder campaign that lands daily: a counter on the counter, a sign at the register, a short message in a receipt or newsletter pointing customers to the exact category where the business competes. The window is short, June 10 to July 4, so every day inside it counts.

Stay inside the printed lines. The page bars the paper's employees and their immediate families from voting, and the daily limit is stated plainly, so anything that encourages multiple submissions in a day works against the rules the organizer has published. For a broader playbook on earning support without bending a ballot's limits, see our award votes page, which sets out how programs like this one are usually approached.