Best of St. Augustine Community's Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the St. Augustine Community's Choice Awards honors and who runs it

The Best of St. Augustine Community's Choice Awards honors the businesses and organizations that readers in St. Augustine, Florida rate highest. It follows the best-of pattern used by local newspapers across the country: the publication asks its audience to nominate the companies they trust, a voting round follows, and the outcome is published as a branded awards list. The organizer is the Gannett-owned local paper serving St. Augustine, and the copyright line on the program page credits USA TODAY NETWORK Ventures, which places this ballot inside the same family of Gannett readers' choice programs that operates across the company's local markets.

The Your Choice Awards site hosts the ballot at yourchoiceawards.com/staugustine/. That site carries the program's phases, its category lineup, its winners section and an awards gala page, so it is the single destination a supporter or a business owner needs to follow. The program page also links business resources and a FAQ, which signals that the organizer treats the ballot as much as a business-facing product as a reader-facing one.

The market is the city of St. Augustine and its surrounding area. Unlike a statewide ballot such as the Best of Florida Awards, this program's scope is a single community, which is why its category list runs so long: a dense local business scene gets a line of its own rather than being folded into a few statewide buckets.

The dated record: which editions are confirmed and when the 2026 window fell

The program is annual, and the Your Choice Awards site carries confirmed 2025 and 2026 editions. The history reaches back further: a 2020 gallery on the platform's embed domain welcomes visitors to the 2020 Best of St. Augustine and states that votes could be placed between June 22nd and July 26th that year. So the program has a history measured in years rather than a single outing, though the calendar has moved, since the 2020 voting window sat in midsummer while the 2026 voting round sat in May.

The 2026 cycle is the most fully dated edition on the page. It opened with a nomination round of March 4-25, 2026, the step the program page describes as the beginning of everything. After nominations ended, the leading companies in each category moved on to the voting round, which ran May 11-25, 2026. Once voting ended, the winners reveal was set for August 5, 2026. Those three phases, nominations, voting and the reveal, are the shape of every cycle on this site.

Two facts stay off the published summary. The page gives the scale of the category lineup only in general terms rather than itemizing every line, and it states no eligibility test for which businesses may be nominated; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Everything else about the shape of a cycle, from the March nominations to the August reveal, is stated plainly on the program page itself.

How a supporter votes in the St. Augustine ballot today

A vote in this ballot is a plain public endorsement with a daily return built in. The program page states the rule plainly: a supporter may cast one vote in a category per day for as long as the round runs. A supporter opens the ballot at yourchoiceawards.com/staugustine/, finds the category their chosen business sits in, and casts the vote. Nothing about the stated rule requires a purchase, a subscription or a newspaper account; the vote is the reader's endorsement, counted once per category per day.

The daily rule is what shapes real campaigns. Because the 2026 voting round ran May 11-25, a business with loyal customers had the whole window in which each supporter could return and vote again in its category. A one-time ask lands a single vote per person; a reminder that repeats across the window multiplies the same supporter's impact within the organizer's own rules. That is why the businesses that do well in Gannett readers' choice ballots tend to be the ones that put their category name in front of customers every day of the round.

The organizer also courts participation on the reader side: the program page promotes a chance to be entered to win a $250 prize draw, tied to taking part. That incentive is aimed at voters, not at businesses, and it sits alongside the awards gala and the winners section that close out each cycle. For a supporter, the sequence is simple: check the phase, pick the category, vote, and come back tomorrow while the round is open.

How this ballot sits beside its Florida neighbours

St. Augustine's ballot sits among several best-of programs on this site's Florida page, and every one of them has a separate publisher behind it. The Best of Florida Awards covers the whole state, while the Best of Miami Readers' Poll, the Best of Orlando ballot, Best of Tallahassee, Best of the Bay and Best in Destin each serve their own metro. A business in St. Augustine competes only in the St. Augustine program, and a vote cast there carries no weight in any of the others.

What distinguishes the St. Augustine ballot is its publisher and the depth of its category lineup. It is a Gannett / USA TODAY Network production on the Your Choice Awards site, which gives it the nomination-then-vote two-phase structure and the gala-and-winners finish described above. Its long category list is a scale statement for a market of St. Augustine's size: the organizer has split the local economy finely enough that a bakery, a plumber and a tour operator each have a lane of their own.

For a supporter or a business owner, the practical consequence is focus. Because the field is one community rather than a whole state, the competition inside a category is local and visible, and a daily-vote push by a handful of regular customers can decide a placement. Because the neighbouring programs are separate, a business expanding across Florida should run each market's ballot as a separate campaign on a separate calendar.

Strengthening support within the rules of this ballot

This program's own rules define what legitimate support looks like. The stated limit is one vote per category per day during the active round, so the strongest compliant push is a routine: name your exact category on receipts, window signs and social posts, and ask every customer to return daily across the voting window. In a round like the 2026 voting stretch of May 11-25, that daily return is where the margin comes from.

The organizer's page says nothing that forbids a business from asking its customers for votes; asking is the normal life of a readers' choice contest, and the $250 giveaway promotion shows the organizer actively courting participation. What the rules do not bless is any method that defeats the once-a-day structure. Before spending on outside help, read our votes guide and weigh it against the chance that a Gannett program audits irregular voting and removes it. A campaign built on real daily returns needs no disclaimers.