Best of Elkhart County: How Voting Works & How to Win

The thing most first-time entrants get wrong about this ballot

Two stages, not one. That's the detail that trips up businesses new to Best of Elkhart County. The Elkhart Truth runs it nominate-then-vote, and the 2026 cycle opened its voting round on April 3. A business owner who spends the whole campaign asking customers to "vote for us" during what's actually still the nomination window has skipped a step that determines whether there's a finalist slot to vote for at all.

The categories themselves run narrow. Best hamburgers. Best auto repair. Best grocery. Not "restaurants" or "shopping" as umbrella groups, specific slots that match how a regular customer would already describe the business. That precision cuts both ways: it rewards a business that picks correctly and buries one that guesses broad.

Elkhart County isn't Indianapolis or South Bend in scale, and the ballot doesn't pretend otherwise. See the Indiana contest hub for how this program sits next to the state's other reader-vote programs, several of which run in cities many times this county's size.

What's confirmed here, and what genuinely isn't yet

Name the gap honestly: no public archive of past Best of Elkhart County winners exists on the record checked for this page, and The Elkhart Truth hasn't published a fixed multi-year nomination-to-close calendar either. What's confirmed is narrower, a nominate-then-vote structure, three sample categories (best hamburgers, best auto repair, best grocery), an April 3 open date for the 2026 voting round, and the $100 participation incentive tied to that same cycle.

Why that gap matters more here than in a bigger-city ballot

A program the size of Indianapolis Monthly's roughly 150-category ballot has enough scale that missing historical data barely dents a campaign plan. Elkhart County's ballot is smaller and more locally specific, so a business can't lean on "we always do well in this category" the way a downtown Indianapolis restaurant might point to prior Readers' Choice runs. Every claim here has to stand on the current cycle alone, which is the same standard covered in what a legitimate vote actually looks like for any reader-choice program this size.

For running a campaign around a category this specific, the restaurant vote campaign guide covers ground that overlaps directly with a best-hamburgers-style slot, and award-style vote campaign guidance applies to the auto-repair and grocery categories the same way. A business weighing package sizes for either stage can check current tiers on the pricing page before committing to a push.

How the mechanics differ from the Sports Illustrated standard

Readers used to the fan-vote polls run by High School on SI, the ones behind Indiana's statewide athlete-of-the-week and player-of-the-year titles, will notice Best of Elkhart County works differently in one key way. SI's polls are single-stage, an editor nominates athletes and the public votes immediately, often with no per-vote cap until close. This ballot adds the nomination filter first. Readers decide who even reaches the finalist stage before a single vote counts toward a category winner.

That earlier filter changes what a campaign push should look like. Getting a strong showing during nomination isn't a warm-up for the real work, it's the gate that determines whether there's a race to run at all in the voting stage. A business that treats nomination as an afterthought and saves its full push for the vote can find there's no finalist slot left to push for.

Elkhart, Goshen, Nappanee, Middlebury, Bristol. Each pulls from a distinct local customer base rather than one countywide audience that thinks and shops identically. A Goshen auto shop's regulars aren't the same people driving a Bristol grocery's foot traffic, even though both could land in adjacent categories on the same ballot. A reminder written for one rarely lands the same way for the other, so a countywide business running locations in more than one of these towns benefits from tailoring the message by area rather than sending one generic version everywhere.

Before results post for a given year and category, "nominated" and "on the ballot" are the honest words to use. "Winner" only applies once The Elkhart Truth publishes it. See how to buy votes for an online contest for the general standard behind any legitimate campaign push, how online contest votes work for the mechanics this two-stage ballot builds on, and whether buying votes is legal for the broader question a business should answer before running any push at all.