Bestburgerbattle: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Best Burger Battle is and who runs it

The Best Burger Battle is Atlanta Magazine's public-vote burger contest, a food-vertical award decided by supporter votes rather than by a judging panel. The organizer is Atlanta Magazine, the long-running Atlanta publication, and the vote lives on the magazine's own website at atlantamagazine.com/bestburgerbattle/ rather than on an external polling service. That matters for supporters: everything about the cycle, from the nominee lineup to the voting button, sits on a domain the publisher controls directly.

The format is unusual among Georgia media ballots. Where most of the magazine's neighbours run broad best-of surveys covering dozens of business categories, this programme narrows to a single dish and wraps the vote around a live event. The page describes a local burger cook-off that also features bourbon, blues, and brews, staged at Lenox Square in Atlanta on Saturday, October 20 from 1pm-5pm. Guests at the event and online supporters both feed the result; the 2017 edition's winner was decided by guests' votes on the day.

The key facts in one place:

Because the publisher and the platform are the same entity, there is no third-party ballot host to account for, and the voting URL above is the page a supporter should bookmark for the current cycle.

Edition history and the October window

Confirmed editions of the Best Burger Battle run across 2018, 2024, 2025 and 2026, and Atlanta Magazine's own pages describe the programme in annual terms. The 2026 cycle is the most recent confirmed edition, and 2027 is the next expected run if the pattern holds. The magazine's own copy has called the event its third annual Best Burger Battle, which fits a programme that has returned across multiple cycles rather than appearing once and disappearing.

The dated anchor for the live cycle is the event itself: Saturday, October 20 from 1pm-5pm at Lenox Square. That date appears on the ballot page, and the voting month is October. The precise online voting dates are absent from the page, so confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Any nomination or entry phase that might precede public voting is likewise undated; Atlanta Magazine has not published those dates on the ballot page.

Two gaps deserve plain naming. First, the organizer has printed nothing about repeat visits, daily returns or who qualifies to take part, so a supporter planning multiple votes should read the live form for whatever rule applies this cycle. Second, no round dates for the online phase are published separately from the event date, which means the October 20 cook-off is the only fixed point a supporter can plan around with confidence.

For a programme with confirmed runs in 2018 and again from 2024 through 2026, the practical takeaway is that the burger battle is a returning October fixture in the Atlanta metro, but its fine print changes from cycle to cycle and only the live page carries the current version.

How a supporter votes in the Best Burger Battle today

The Best Burger Battle ballot is a plain public vote carried on Atlanta Magazine's own site. A supporter loads the page at atlantamagazine.com/bestburgerbattle/, reviews the burger field printed for the current cycle, selects a favorite and submits the vote. No third-party ballot service sits between the reader and the publisher, so the page a supporter votes on is the same domain that publishes the magazine's restaurant coverage.

The 2017 edition shows how the result is built: the winner that year was decided by guests' votes at the event, meaning the people attending the Lenox Square cook-off cast the deciding ballots in person. The current format pairs that in-person element with the online ballot, so a supporter has two routes into the result, attending the Saturday, October 20 event or voting through the website during the window.

Sign-in rules are absent from the ballot. Atlanta Magazine has not printed any account requirement for this vote, so a supporter should be able to participate directly from the page; if a login step exists in a given cycle, it will appear on the live form. The same holds for repeat voting: no daily-return rule is published, so the frequency a single supporter may vote is governed by whatever the live ballot states this cycle.

Timing is the other practical point. The only fixed date on the page is the October 20 cook-off, so anyone hoping to vote online should visit the ballot in the weeks around that date rather than assuming a year-round form. If the page shows an active vote, the window is open; if it shows event promotion only, the window has either closed or not yet opened for that cycle.

How the Best Burger Battle sits beside its Georgia neighbours

Atlanta Magazine publishes several public-vote programmes, and the burger battle is the narrowest of them. Its sibling Best of Atlanta is the publisher's flagship multi-category readers poll, covering the city's businesses across a wide roster of categories. The burger battle takes one dish, one event and one window, and wraps a live cook-off around the vote, which no other programme on the magazine's slate does.

Outside the publisher, Georgia's media ballot landscape includes Athens Community's Choice Awards, Best of Augusta, Best of Cobb, Best of Forsyth and Best of Middle Georgia. Each of those is a broad best-of survey answering to a separate publisher in a separate market, from Athens to Augusta to the Cobb and Forsyth suburbs. None of them stages a live cook-off as part of the vote, and none of them narrows to a single menu item the way this one does.

For a restaurant, that difference changes the strategy. A broad readers poll spreads attention across many categories, so a business competes on breadth of community support. The burger battle concentrates everything on one product, so a kitchen known for a single standout burger can win on the strength of that dish alone, backed by an event crowd at Lenox Square as well as online voters. For supporters weighing where their attention goes, the burger battle is the October, food-specific option in the Atlanta metro, while the magazine's wider poll and the other Georgia markets run on their own calendars and their own rules.

Strengthening support for a Best Burger Battle nominee

Because this ballot concentrates on one dish, support campaigns work best when they name the burger itself. A restaurant can point customers straight to the Atlanta Magazine ballot page, ask them to back the specific nominee, and time the ask around the October 20 cook-off at Lenox Square, when local food coverage of the event is at its peak. Attendance matters too: the 2017 winner was decided by guests' votes on the day, so turning out supporters in person has a published precedent in this programme's own history.

Atlanta Magazine has not published a rule addressing outside help or purchased votes for this ballot, and it has not printed a per-supporter cap, so the organizer's stated position on either is simply absent from the page. What a nominee can rely on is the public-vote format itself: every vote counts the same, whether cast at the event or online. For a fuller picture of outreach methods that fit public-vote ballots, see our votes guide, and for the service side, buy votes online explains the general mechanics without promising any particular outcome in this or any contest.