Best of Miami Lakes Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Best of Miami Lakes Awards is and who runs it

The Best of Miami Lakes Awards is a business recognition ballot for Miami Lakes, Florida, run by the Town of Miami Lakes and its Economic Development Committee. It is a best-of style program: the community nominates and then votes for favorite local businesses, and the Town frames the whole exercise around celebrating the shops, restaurants and service providers that serve the town. The 2026 cycle carries the "10th Annual" label, which places the program among the longer-running municipal business awards in the area.

The host is the Town itself. Unlike reader polls run by newspapers or contests run on third-party voting platforms, this ballot lives on the Town's official website at miamilakes-fl.gov, and the current cycle's page sits at miamilakes-fl.gov/bestofmiamilakes2026. That matters for a supporter in a practical way: there is no external platform account between a voter and the form, and every instruction about rounds, categories and deadlines comes from the same municipal source. Town Hall is at 6601 Main Street in Miami Lakes, FL 33014, and the Town's communications office handles the announcements.

The Economic Development Committee's involvement signals the audience. This is a business community award, not a people's-choice contest for individuals, so the nominees are Miami Lakes businesses and the voters are the people who spend money with them, residents and visitors alike. The table underneath lists the program's fixed facts for quick reference.

The dated record for the 2026 cycle and the years before it

The Town's page for the current cycle dates both rounds precisely. The Nomination Round opened on Tuesday, July 22 and closed on Monday, August 31 at 11:59 p.m. Following the announcement of finalists, the Finalist Voting Round runs from September 25 through October 2, which the Town describes as giving the community one last opportunity to vote for their favorite businesses. The summer-to-fall shape matches the Town's own framing, which ties the nomination opening to the approach of the summer season.

On recurrence, the program is annual and the 2026 edition is the 10th. The Town's ballot page confirms 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026 as edition years, four consecutive cycles that anchor the recent run. The "10th Annual" label points to earlier editions before those, but the current page does not print a first-run year, so the confirmed run on the page begins with the 2023 cycle.

Several facts a voter might want are not on the page. The Town has not printed a category count, a per-person vote limit or an eligibility rule for the 2026 ballot; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The same applies to how finalists are selected from the nomination pool and when results are announced after October 2. Because the Town hosts the ballot itself, each year's page is the authoritative source for that year's rules, and the 2026 page is the one cited throughout this guide.

How a supporter votes in the Miami Lakes ballot today

Voting here is a straightforward public process in two phases, and the Town addresses it to a broad audience: residents and visitors are invited to take part. In the first phase, the Nomination Round, a supporter names favorite Miami Lakes businesses in a variety of categories. That phase closed on August 31 for the 2026 cycle, so nominations submitted now have nowhere to land until the next edition opens.

The phase open today is the Finalist Voting Round, September 25 through October 2. Here the ballot shifts from open naming to choosing among finalists: the community votes for its favorite businesses from the list the nomination round produced. A supporter visits the Town's page at miamilakes-fl.gov/bestofmiamilakes2026, works through the categories shown, and submits choices for the businesses they want to back. No third-party platform sits in the middle, since the Town hosts the form on its own domain.

Practical points follow from that setup. The window is short, eight days from September 25 to October 2, so a business that wants community support has a narrow span in which its customers must act. The Town has not published a rule on how frequently a single supporter may cast votes or whether an account is needed, so the form on the live page is the guide. And because the ballot is for businesses rather than people, a vote is an endorsement of a Miami Lakes establishment, which is why the Town frames participation as a community opportunity rather than a spectator activity.

How this ballot sits beside its Florida neighbours

Miami Lakes is a town with its own municipal award program, which distinguishes it from the larger best-of ballots covering Florida. The Best of Florida Awards runs at the statewide level, and the Best of Miami Readers' Poll covers the broader Miami market. A business inside Miami Lakes can appear in a local town ballot and in a metro or statewide one, and each answers to its own organizer with its own dates and rules.

The same pattern repeats across the state. The Best of Orlando ballot serves the Orlando market, the Best of Tallahassee program serves the capital, the Best of the Bay covers its own bay-area market, and Best in Destin serves the Panhandle resort town. None of these shares the Town of Miami Lakes as an organizer.

What makes the Miami Lakes ballot distinct is its publisher and its scale. It is run by the town government itself, through the Economic Development Committee, rather than by a newspaper or a media company, and the nominee pool is the business community of one town rather than a whole metro. For a Miami Lakes business, that means the competition is strictly local and the voters are the town's own residents and visitors, a smaller and more personal electorate than a statewide ballot draws. The two-round structure, nominations in summer and finalist voting in early fall, is the Town's own design.

Strengthening support for a Miami Lakes business on this ballot

Because the finalist round is only eight days long, September 25 through October 2, a Miami Lakes business benefits from preparation before the window opens rather than a scramble inside it. The Town invites residents and visitors to vote, so the audience is anyone who shops in town, not only residents. The Town prints no rule on outside help or on vote volume, so the practical ceiling is what the live form allows.

The organizer's own channels are the model here: the Town announces the program through its official website and asks the community to participate directly. A business can do the same with its own customers, sharing the Town's ballot link and naming the categories it is a finalist in. Approaches that never touch the ballot's unpublished rules are the safest ones, and the general playbook for community ballots is covered in how to get more votes online.