Best of Madison County 2025: How Voting Works & How to Win

What Best of Madison County is and who runs it

Best of Madison County 2025 is a readers' choice ballot published by The Herald Bulletin, the daily newspaper for Anderson and Madison County in Indiana. This is a best-of style ballot: local businesses and services go up for public vote, and readers decide which names finish on top in each category. The Herald Bulletin places the ballot on Second Street, the contest platform many publishers run public votes on, at the address heraldbulletin2.secondstreetapp.com. The specific promotion is the Best of Madison County 2025 ballot, which the platform classifies as a nomination-and-voting ballot rather than a simple poll or a sweepstakes.

Two facts anchor the program's identity. First, the organizer is a publisher, not a chamber of commerce or an events group, so the ballot is an editorial product of the paper itself. Second, the market is a county rather than a single city: the whole of Madison County is the catchment, with Anderson as the paper's home base. That shape matters for supporters, because a business anywhere in the county shares this ballot with one based in Anderson.

The dated record: editions and the voting window

The program's confirmed editions fall in 2024 and 2025. The 2025 promotion is the one with a fully dated window: it opened on November 18, 2024 and closed on January 22, 2025, a span that runs from mid-November through late January and is now marked closed on the platform. The ballot's address carries the 2025 label because that is the promotion's own name, even though the window began in November 2024.

On recurrence, The Herald Bulletin's own description calls Best of Madison County "the newspaper's annual Best of Madison County survey," and the paper's Second Street hub shows activity carrying into 2026. Taken together, the program reads as a yearly fixture on the paper's calendar rather than a one-off. What the paper has not done is announce opening or closing dates for the next cycle, so the ballot page is where a new window's dates will surface first.

One more gap belongs in this section. The Herald Bulletin has not published the ballot's category list or its voting rules on the promotion page; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Apart from that, every fact here comes from the paper's platform listing; the category roster and the rule fine print appear only on the ballot while a window is open.

How a supporter votes on the ballot

The mechanic is the one the ballot type names: a Second Street nomination-and-voting ballot. A supporter opens the Best of Madison County page on heraldbulletin2.secondstreetapp.com, works through the ballot one category at a time, and selects the local business or service to back in each. Second Street ballots of this kind commonly ask supporters to identify themselves before votes count, so expect a sign-in or registration step if the live ballot shows one.

Because the 2025 window is closed, a supporter today cannot cast a vote on this promotion. The practical routine is to watch the ballot page for the next cycle's opening, then work through the categories in one sitting or across several visits, depending on what the on-page rules allow. Because the paper publishes no cap and no eligibility terms, the rules the ballot displays during an open window are the authoritative version.

Two habits keep a supporter's effort safe. First, read the closing date before planning repeat visits, since a window that shuts in late January leaves no room for a last-minute rush. Second, submit only through the ballot page itself; links that imitate the address but land elsewhere do not count toward any category.

How this ballot sits beside its Indiana neighbours

Madison County's ballot is one of several best-of programs across Indiana, and the differences are organizational. Best of Indiana is a statewide program, the CommunityVotes ballots in Bloomington, Evansville, Fort Wayne and South Bend are city-level programs under the CommunityVotes structure, and Best of Elkhart County is a county-wide ballot run by a different publisher, Elkhart Truth. Best of Madison County belongs to the county-wide, publisher-run group: one newspaper, one county, one ballot on the paper's own Second Street hub.

That structure has a practical consequence for any business with customers in more than one market. Support earned on the Madison County ballot counts only here; a fan base in Elkhart County or Fort Wayne has to show up on that market's own ballot under its own organizer's rules. The Herald Bulletin's hub also carries other promotions, including sweepstakes and an influential-women ballot, so a supporter landing on the paper's Second Street address should confirm they are on the Best of Madison County page before voting.

For readers comparing programs, the closest structural match is Best of Elkhart County, since both pair a county catchment with a local newspaper as organizer. The city-level CommunityVotes ballots and the statewide Best of Indiana answer to different publishers and different rule sets entirely.

Strengthening support in this ballot's own terms

Support in Best of Madison County is built on the ballot's own mechanic: a nomination-and-voting ballot where each category takes a selection and a submit. The most dependable routine is one that fits the window, which ran from mid-November to late January in the confirmed 2025 edition, so a business has the whole window to turn customers into voters. Ask in person at the counter, put the ballot address on receipts and social posts, and keep the reminders coming while the window is still open rather than in its final days.

The Herald Bulletin has not published rules about outside help on the promotion page, which means the live ballot's own terms are the only guide to what is allowed. Whatever a business decides, the safe position is to follow the rules printed on the ballot during the open window. For a broader view of tactics that work across public-vote contests, see our guide to getting more votes online, and for how paid support is handled in award-style ballots, see our award votes page.