Evansville Living Best of the City: How Voting Works & How to Win

What is Evansville Living Best of the City, and who runs it?

Best of the City is the readers' choice franchise of Evansville Living, a city magazine serving Evansville, Indiana. The masthead credit pairs Evansville Living Magazine with Tucker Publishing Group, and the vote is hosted at evansvilleliving.com itself rather than routed through an outside polling service. The format is a citywide public vote: readers mark the businesses, organizations, places and people they rate highest, and the editors then present those favorites in the magazine's Best of Evansville feature.

The publisher states that readers have been voting for the stand-apart businesses and people in town since 2001, and that the Best of the City story has appeared in the magazine across that entire span, growing into a point of pride among the winners. Coverage stretches across food, service, shopping, people and entertainment instead of a single niche, which is what gives the ballot its citywide reach. Because the outcome turns on how many supporters turn up and mark a favorite, the vote functions as a popularity measure of Evansville itself, and the magazine frames it exactly that way, asking readers to pick favorites in a city full of options.

When does voting run, and which editions of the ballot are on the books?

The program is annual. Ballots went live in 2025 and came back around in 2026. Looking back at its 2025 round, the magazine described winners reaching across food, service, shopping, people and entertainment, with picks from the Evansville Living editors placed alongside the reader-driven results.

The voting phase sits early in the calendar year, across January and February. Past cycles bear that out in print. Bob's Gym was named Best Place to Get Fit in the January/February 2013 issue, and the 2014 feature thanked readers for helping present that year's Best of Evansville. Winner history runs deeper still: Cheddar's Casual Café, open since 2012, was voted Best New Restaurant for the second year in a row on the strength of reader support alone.

An annual rhythm paired with a two-month window gives local businesses a compact stretch to mobilize, and the magazine's own pages are where any rule change would surface first. Specifics stay thin beyond that. The ballot carries no printed per-supporter vote limit, no eligibility wording and no staged-round schedule. For those particulars, confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How does a supporter actually cast a ballot today?

Voting takes three moves. A supporter opens the Best of the City page on evansvilleliving.com, works down the category list marking a favorite on each line worth answering, and sends the finished ballot in while the January and February window lasts. No sign-in step is printed on the pages, the vote costs nothing, and the whole exercise runs as a plain web form on the magazine's domain.

The category spread is unusually broad. Names visible on the ballot include Best Taco, Best Burrito and Best Pizza on the food side, Best Yoga Studio among fitness businesses, Best Artist and Best Musician among creative entries, Best Comeback as an editors' line and Best Place as a general honor. Those are samples of the ballot's shape rather than a complete roster, because the lineup shifts from cycle to cycle.

Breadth changes the experience, too. Someone with strong opinions about the local food scene can finish quickly, while a voter following the people and entertainment lines will linger over the choices. Either way the action stays the same, a marked favorite per category, submitted before the window shuts.

Where does this ballot sit among Indiana's other reader votes?

Indiana carries a busy field of community choice ballots, and this one has a distinct profile. The nearest neighbour in the same city is CommunityVotes Evansville Best Of, a separate reader vote with its own category structure and its own rules. Beyond the city line sit CommunityVotes Bloomington IN Best Of, CommunityVotes Fort Wayne Best Of, YourChoiceAwards South Bend Best Of and the Best of Elkhart County ballot put out by the Elkhart Truth, with Best of Indiana covering the whole state.

Scale separates them further. Best of Indiana addresses voters statewide, while the Bloomington, Fort Wayne, South Bend and Elkhart County ballots each anchor to their own communities, leaving Evansville's citywide contest with a market it does not share.

What distinguishes Best of the City from that pack is ownership and tie-in. The ballot belongs to Evansville Living and runs under the magazine's domain, the results feed a print-and-web feature rather than a standalone announcement, and the editors fold their own selections in beside the reader winners. For a business with an Evansville customer base, that means a win here carries the magazine's editorial framing with it, a different kind of visibility from what a pure community poll delivers.

How can a nominated business strengthen its standing?

The current ballot page titles itself Best of the City 2026, so the live cycle is running in the form the magazine prints it. Because the ballot spreads across many lines, from tacos to yoga studios to musicians, an effort that rallies regulars category by category touches far more of the ballot than a single-line push ever would. The magazine publishes no policy on outside help, so any organized push should be weighed against the tone of a reader vote first. Background reading on widening support sits in the guide to getting more votes online, and the makeup of paid vote packages is laid out on the award-votes page. No outside effort of any kind can promise a top spot in a ballot whose outcome rests on citywide participation.