Best in Indiana: How Voting Works & How to Win

What Best in Indiana is and who runs it

Best in Indiana is a public-vote awards program for businesses and places across the state of Indiana. It is run jointly by Main Street United and Midwestern Traveler Magazine, and the magazine hosts the ballot itself, with no third-party contest platform involved. The URL is midwesterntraveler.com/best-in-indiana/ and that page serves as the nomination form, the ballot and the results board for the program.

Midwestern Traveler is a travel publication, and the awards program sits inside a family of similar ballots the publisher runs for neighboring states under names such as Best in Kentucky, Best in Florida and Best in Ohio, plus a Best of the Ohio River Region edition. Best in Indiana is the Indiana member of that family. The fact that a publication with an editorial operation runs it means the ballot is part of the magazine's reader engagement rather than a standalone contest site.

The program is a best-of style ballot: supporters nominate businesses in the opening round, and the finalists that emerge go to a public vote. It is aimed at Indiana businesses and the customers who want to back them. Because it is statewide, any nominated business in the state can appear on the ballot, which makes the nomination round as consequential as the vote itself.

What is known about the schedule, and what is not

Two editions are confirmed, in 2024 and 2025. The organizer's own promotional material calls the program the 2nd Annual Best in Indiana, which matches the two-year run and signals an intent to continue yearly. A nomination round opens before each voting window, and the organizer announces that opening on its site before the ballot itself is live.

The one hard date for the 2025 cycle is the close of voting: the ballot page stated that voting would remain open until October 26th. That is the date a supporter works against. No opening date for the 2025 voting window is published, and no dates for the 2026 cycle have been stated by the organizer.

Several details are simply not printed anywhere ahead of time. The category list for a given cycle appears on the ballot page when voting is live and not before. No per-voter rule, no daily vote limit and no eligibility policy are published in advance. Exact nomination opening dates for future rounds, and any platform round dates beyond the October close, follow the same pattern and should be confirmed on the live ballot each cycle.

The practical consequence is that a business planning a support push has one reliable anchor, the October close, and should treat everything else as unknown until the current page says otherwise. The 2024 edition's exact window was never published either.

How a supporter votes today

Every Best in Indiana vote is cast directly on the Midwestern Traveler page. A supporter opens midwesterntraveler.com/best-in-indiana/ in a browser, scrolls the categories printed there, and submits a vote for the business or place they want to back in the category where it appears. No separate contest platform, app or login portal is involved; the form is on the magazine's page.

The sequence that matters starts earlier than the vote. Because the program runs a nomination round first, a business that is not yet a finalist cannot be voted for at all. Supporters who want a specific business on the ballot need to act during the nomination window, when the organizer announces that nominations are open. Once the finalist list is set, the voting round decides the outcome.

Three mechanics go unstated on the ballot: how many ballots one supporter may cast across the window, whether an email address is demanded, and whether votes from outside Indiana count. Those details are shown, if at all, on the ballot page during the live window. Reading the instructions next to each category before submitting is how a supporter learns whether daily returns are allowed for that cycle.

The October 26th close from the 2025 cycle is the date to watch. A vote submitted before the deadline counts; a vote after it does not. Supporters planning a final push should confirm the printed close date on the page itself rather than relying on a calendar from a previous year.

How Best in Indiana sits among Indiana's other ballots

Indiana has no shortage of best-of ballots, and Best in Indiana is distinct from all of them in one structural way: Midwestern Traveler Magazine and Main Street United run it on infrastructure they control, with no shared contest platform underneath. Most other programs in the state run on CommunityVotes or similar hosted systems. That means Best in Indiana's rules, forms and deadlines are managed directly by the two organizers, not by a platform vendor.

The nearest neighbors include the statewide Best of Indiana ballot, which is a separate program from a different publisher despite the similar name. City-level programs cover Bloomington through CommunityVotes Bloomington IN Best Of, Evansville through CommunityVotes Evansville Best Of, Fort Wayne through CommunityVotes Fort Wayne Best Of and South Bend through YourChoiceAwards South Bend Best Of. Elkhart County has its own county-wide program at Best of Elkhart County.

That hosting choice changes where a nominee should focus its effort. A statewide ballot like this one draws from a broader audience than a city or county program, but it also competes with a wider field of nominees. Rules are not portable: a vote cap on one ballot has no bearing on this one, and the reverse holds too.

Midwestern Traveler's sibling ballots in Kentucky, Florida and Ohio follow the same publisher-owned model, so a reader who understands one has a head start on the others, though each edition and each state carries its own rules.

Strengthening support for a nominee

The most effective work for a Best in Indiana nominee starts in the nomination round, not the voting round. A business that secures its finalist spot early has the full voting window to collect support, while one that scrambles in late loses days against the October 26th style deadline. Ask regular customers to nominate as soon as the organizer announces the round is open.

During voting, the page-based mechanic favors direct asks. A short email or receipt-footer line pointing customers to the exact category on midwesterntraveler.com/best-in-indiana/ converts better than a generic social post, because the supporter lands on the ballot with one action to take. If the ballot allows daily returns, a reminder on the same schedule multiplies the effect.

The organizer publishes no rule on outside help, paid promotion or vote volume, so no outside source can promise what a purchased vote package would or would not achieve under those rules. Read the ballot's own terms during the live window and treat that text as the governing authority. For a discussion of the wider question, the legality overview and the award votes page cover the ground without program-specific claims.