Best of the Teche: How Voting Works & How to Win

Eight editions since 2018: what actually backs up Best of the Teche

Few programs in this batch carry as much confirmed history as Best of the Teche. The platform archive lists editions in 2018, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026, eight years total, with 2019 the single confirmed gap in that span.

The Daily Iberian, a newspaper headquartered in New Iberia, Louisiana, organizes the ballot at thedailyiberian.secondstreetapp.com, hosted through Second Street rather than the newspaper's own iberianet.com domain. The 2026 window ran May 24 through July 26, 2026, and has since closed.

Eight editions is a substantial run for a program this size, but that history doesn't stretch to cover the fine print. Confirm on the live ballot each cycle for anything past the dates above, since neither categories nor a vote ceiling appear on the page itself.

One combined ballot, run from an address separate from the paper's own site

Best of the Teche does not separate nominating from voting into two stages; the platform lists it as a single ballot type covering both at once, which is why May 24 to July 26 is the only date range tied to the 2026 edition.

The Daily Iberian's own website sits at iberianet.com, distinct from thedailyiberian.secondstreetapp.com, the Second Street subdomain that actually hosts Best of the Teche. A business searching for the ballot on the newspaper's main site could easily miss it if it isn't looking for that separate address.

What the 2019 gap does and doesn't mean

A single missing year out of nine possible ones doesn't suggest the program folded; it restarted the following year and has run every year since. It's still a reason to treat any assumption about next year's exact timing as provisional until thedailyiberian.secondstreetapp.com actually confirms it.

Teche-area coverage, tied to one newspaper's own footprint

The Daily Iberian's own headquarters sit in New Iberia, Louisiana, and the confirmed page ties Best of the Teche to that newspaper without spelling out a formal service boundary beyond it. No list of towns, no parish-by-parish breakdown and no note about neighboring communities appears on the ballot page itself.

Second Street hosts several other programs for The Daily Iberian on the same account, including seasonal sweepstakes and a separate photo-voting contest, none of which share Best of the Teche's own name, dates or rules.

A business outside New Iberia proper but inside The Daily Iberian's usual coverage area has no printed rule ruling it out of Best of the Teche, since the confirmed page never draws that line itself. Rather than guessing at a radius the newspaper hasn't published, the safer approach is checking directly with The Daily Iberian, or simply entering and letting the live form decide whether the business qualifies.

Working from eight years of history, not a blank slate

A program with eight confirmed editions carries a different kind of credibility than a first-time ballot: customers have plausibly seen Best of the Teche before, even in years the business itself didn't take part. That familiarity is worth leaning on directly when asking for support, rather than treating the ask as a cold introduction. Mentioning the specific past years a business has appeared, where that's true, tends to land better than a generic request for a vote.

None of that history changes what still counts as a safe approach. Real supporters, reached more than once across a live window, remain the only dependable path; automated or purchased activity threatens the whole entry no matter how many past editions back the program up. is buying votes legal sets out where ordinary supporter outreach ends and something more dangerous begins. Buying votes online breaks down how paid support is typically structured for a ballot that folds nominating and voting into one pass, and award-vote campaign planning applies directly to a long-running readers'-choice program of this kind.