Michiana's A-List 2026 (b100): How Voting Works & How to Win

What Michiana's A-List 2026 is and who runs it

Most best-of ballots in Indiana answer to a newspaper or to a national community-voting brand. This one answers to a radio station. Michiana's A-List 2026 is run by WBYT-FM, the country station known on air as B100, licensed in Elkhart, Indiana, with a broadcast area that reaches South Bend and the surrounding Michiana region. The program is a business best-of contest in which the public names and supports local businesses, and it sits on Second Street, the contest host the station uses for everything else on its calendar.

That host detail matters more than it first appears. The station's Second Street domain, b100.secondstreetapp.com, carries a long list of listener promotions, from sweepstakes to a morning-show book club, and the A-List ballot lives among them at its own address. A supporter who searches casually can land on a prize drawing instead of the ballot, so the specific program URL is the only reliable entry point.

For quick reference, the program's fixed details are laid out here.

The dated picture: one confirmed edition and its window

The dated picture for this program is short and precise. One edition is confirmed, the 2026 run, and its window is fixed: voting opens September 7, 2026 and closes October 14, 2026. The listing currently carries the status upcoming, which means the ballot has not yet opened at the time these dates were published, and the opening date is the moment the live form becomes usable.

This is the first confirmed edition; whether it returns next year is not yet published; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The program name reads like a recurring award, and the station's habit of running promotions continuously on the same host suggests a calendar rather than a one-off, but nothing published states a 2027 edition, so the honest position is that 2026 is the only proven year.

Two other facts are missing from the published material and deserve plain statement. The station has not printed the list of ballot categories anywhere this page draws from, and it has not printed the per-supporter rule, the eligibility terms or any outside-help policy either. Those gaps are not unusual for a radio best-of ballot in its first run, but they change how a nominee should plan: every planning decision that depends on a category name, a vote frequency or an eligibility rule has to wait for the live form. The category roster, in particular, is the fact nominees ask about most, and the combined nomination-and-voting format means it will appear on the ballot itself rather than in a separate announcement.

How a supporter votes on the ballot today

The literal mechanic is a ballot that folds nomination and voting into a single flow. A supporter opens the program URL, and the same form that lets them name a business also lets them cast support for one already listed. No separate nomination stage needs waiting for and no separate voting stage needs returning for; one visit can accomplish both. That format shapes everything about how a campaign should be timed, because a business can be named and supported in the same visit by the same person.

What the form does not publish in advance is the fine print. The frequency rule, meaning how often one supporter may act, is not stated in the published material. Neither is the eligibility rule, meaning who may take part or whether a registration step is required. Second Street ballots commonly ask supporters to identify themselves before a vote counts, but the exact requirement for this ballot is set by the form itself, and the station has not printed it elsewhere.

For a supporter, the sequence is therefore simple. Open the ballot page during the September 7 to October 14 window, read the instructions the form prints at the top, complete the nomination or voting fields it presents, and submit. Should the form request an email address or a sign-in, that step belongs to the ballot's own design. Anything a supporter expects to find that the form does not show is a detail the station has chosen not to publish in advance, and the live form alone settles it.

How this ballot sits beside its Indiana neighbours

Michiana's best-of vote is not a crowded field of identical ballots; it is a set of contests with different owners and different shapes. The closest geographic neighbour is Best of Elkhart County, a newspaper-run contest covering much of the same ground from the print side. The nearest city-branded rival is YourChoiceAwards South Bend Best Of, part of the CommunityVotes family, which also runs separate ballots in Fort Wayne, Evansville and Bloomington. At the state level, Best of Indiana spans all of Indiana under a publisher of its own.

What separates the A-List from all of them is the owner and the channel. WBYT-FM is a broadcaster, not a publisher or a voting-brand partner, which means the ballot is promoted on air to a country-music audience rather than through a newspaper's readership or a national voting site's traffic. The station's sister frequencies in the Michiana cluster give it a wider promotional base than a single signal would, and its Second Street host ties the ballot to a calendar of listener promotions that keeps an audience returning to the domain year round.

For a business weighing where to spend effort, the difference is practical. A nominee can appear on several of these ballots at once, since each answers to its own organizer, but the audiences differ: the newspaper contest reaches readers, the CommunityVotes ballots reach city-branded search traffic, and the A-List reaches radio listeners in Elkhart and South Bend. A business whose customers hear B100 has an audience here that the other ballots cannot reach.

Strengthening support within this ballot's rules

Because this ballot folds nomination and voting into one flow, the strongest move a nominee can make is early and repeated exposure while the form is open. A customer who visits once can both name the business and support it, so every ask should point at the ballot URL directly rather than at a general station page. Radio gives the station the reach; the nominee's job is to convert the customers it already has.

Regarding outside help, the station has not published an outside-help or automation policy in the material this page draws from, so the enforceable standard is whatever the live ballot prints. A push that depends on volume from strangers carries more risk than one built on real customers, on any ballot, and this one is no exception. Keep the effort anchored to people who genuinely use the business, remind them during the window, and let the form's own rules govern frequency. For a wider view of what works on public ballots, see our award-votes page.