VDT Best of Best 2025: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes and why the Valdosta Daily Times ballot matters

Every winter, readers of the Valdosta Daily Times get the chance to say outright which local businesses they rate most. The VDT Best of Best 2025 is that newspaper's readers-choice ballot for Valdosta, Georgia, and it belongs to the best-of tradition that most American dailies now run: the publisher opens a form, the public nominates favourites, and the same public votes among them until the window closes. The prize for a business is not cash, it is a title that carries the newspaper's name and, with it, a year of credibility in front of the exact audience that buys from Valdosta shops and restaurants.

The mechanics matter to anyone hoping to appear on that final list. The promotion is typed on Second Street as a NominationAndVotingBallot, which means a supporter does not wait for a shortlist before acting. When the form opens, a reader can write a favourite into a category directly, and later supporters vote for the entries that have accumulated. A business that mobilizes early therefore benefits twice: its name appears on the ballot for others to find, and the people it reaches first can both nominate and vote in the same session.

Who actually participates? The newspaper's readership defines the pool. The Valdosta Daily Times is the daily paper serving Valdosta in south Georgia, and its best-of ballot draws the people who already trust its coverage: local shoppers, diners, parents and business owners. That makes the competition unusually honest by advertising standards. A business cannot buy a line in the paper's editorial pages, but it can earn the Best of Best title by convincing its own customers to spend a few minutes on a Second Street form during the winter window.

For an organizer, the programme sits alongside a stable of other Second Street promotions run under the same account, from quarterly sweepstakes to the Best of Valdosta series. For a supporter, though, the thing to understand is simpler: this is the community's own verdict on Valdosta businesses, decided by whoever turns up and votes while the ballot is live.

The 2025 edition and the dates that are actually confirmed

The confirmed dates for this programme are narrow and precise. The VDT Best of Best 2025 ballot opened for public voting on December 17, 2024 and closed on February 8, 2025. Its status on Second Street is closed, and the promotion type throughout was the combined nomination-and-voting ballot described above. Those dates come from the ballot listing itself, so they can be treated as firm.

Editions are confirmed for two years: 2024 and 2025. The recurrence is annual in shape, with the ballot falling in the winter months, running from mid-December into early February. The publisher's own calendar supports the pattern: after the 2025 edition closed, the same Second Street account carried the 2026 Best of Valdosta, a best-of ballot that ran from December 16, 2025 through February 6, 2026. That follow-up sits within the same seasonal slot the Best of Best occupied, and it is listed under the identical organization account on valdostadailytimes.secondstreetapp.com.

What the newspaper has not published is equally relevant. The ballot listing shows no category lineup, no vote cap and no eligibility terms, and no standing rules page accompanies the promotion. Anyone who needs those details for planning purposes has to confirm on the live ballot each cycle. None of this amounts to a promise that the programme will appear again under the same name; the 2026 ballot already carries a different title, and publishers in this market do rename their readers-choice promotions between years.

One more dated fact rounds out the picture: the ballot's organization account, number 2086942 on Second Street, is the same account behind the newspaper's quarterly sweepstakes, the most recent of which ran in late 2026. The best-of ballot and the sweepstakes share hosting but not format.

How a supporter votes on the Second Street form

Voting in the VDT Best of Best follows the standard Second Street flow, and knowing it in advance is the difference between a supporter who finishes and one who gives up halfway. Start at valdostadailytimes.secondstreetapp.com and open the ballot for the edition that is currently live. The 2025 ballot sits at its own address, and each edition gets a fresh page, so an old link points to a closed form rather than the current one.

Second Street ballots of this type ask the supporter to register with an email address before votes count. Registration is quick, but it is the point where most one-time voters stall, so a business recruiting supporters should warn them it is coming. Once inside, the form presents the categories. Because the promotion merges nomination and voting into a single form, a category with no entries yet invites the supporter to write one in; a category with entries offers them for selection. Searching for a business by name is faster than scrolling, but the name typed must match the entry, or the vote fragments across two listings.

After voting, the form typically offers registration for reminders or confirmation of the votes cast. Whether a supporter may come back the following day and cast further votes is not stated on the ballot listing, so that behaviour should be tested on the live form during an open window rather than assumed. When the window closes, at 8 February in the 2025 edition's case, the form stops accepting votes and the newspaper moves to announcing results.

The practical takeaway for organizers is to give supporters the exact ballot address, a nudge about email registration, and the correct business name in writing. Those three pieces prevent almost every dropped vote this format produces.

Where this ballot sits among Georgia readers-choice programmes

Georgia is one of the busiest states for newspaper-run best-of ballots, and the VDT Best of Best is the Valdosta market's entry in that crowd. Its closest relatives on this site are the Athens Community's Choice Awards, run in the college town to the north, and the Best of Augusta from the magazine of the same name. Each belongs to another publisher in another city, so a vote cast in one carries no weight toward another.

The metro-scale programmes are larger still. The Best of Atlanta covers the state's biggest market, while the Best of Cobb from Cobb Life Magazine concentrates on one suburban county. Further afield, the Best of Forsyth serves the fast-growing counties north of Atlanta and the Best of Middle Georgia aggregates the Macon region. What distinguishes the Valdosta ballot is scale and identity: it is a single-city programme run by the town's own daily paper, not a regional aggregator.

That local focus shapes strategy. In Valdosta the pool of voting businesses and supporters is smaller, so a concentrated push from one well-liked business can move a category in a way it could not in Atlanta. The counterweight is the publisher's own calendar: the Valdosta Daily Times runs several promotions a year under the same Second Street account, including quarterly sweepstakes, so the audience the Best of Best depends on is the audience the paper has already built.

For a business weighing which Georgia ballot to pursue, the honest answer is the one whose readers are its customers. A Valdosta storefront gains nothing from an Atlanta title, and the reverse holds too.

Strengthening support in the VDT Best of Best

Because this ballot lives on Second Street and closes on a fixed winter date, support has to be organized in advance. The most effective tactics are the unglamorous ones: ask customers at the register during the first weeks of the window, put the ballot link in the business's email signature, and give supporters the exact name under which the business should appear so votes do not split. Since nomination and voting share one form, an early push both secures the entry and banks votes at once.

Where the newspaper stands on outside help matters here. The Valdosta Daily Times does not publish a rules page for this promotion, so its stance on purchased votes is unknown, and a campaign showing irregular activity can put the entry itself at risk. Support that comes from genuine customers carries none of that exposure. For a broader treatment of how support tactics work on newspaper ballots, our page on earning votes in online contests walks through the options, and the legal framing is set out at whether buying votes is legal.