Best Of Howard: How Voting Works & How to Win

What Is the Best of Howard Contest and Who Runs It?

Best of Howard is a best-of style awards program for the Howard market: local businesses compete for community honors, and the community itself supplies the verdict. The organizer is The Baltimore Sun, which runs the ballot on Second Street, its contest platform tenant at baltimoresun.secondstreetapp.com; the 2025 edition sits at https://baltimoresun.secondstreetapp.com/Best-of-Howard-2025/.

The area the title points to is Howard, Maryland, and businesses there treat the honor as a county-level badge. Their own award notices refer to the program as "Best of Howard County," language that matches how the local market talks about the contest even though the ballot's short title reads Best of Howard.

The organization behind the ballot

The Baltimore Sun promotes the program and controls the Second Street address that carries the ballot, so a supporter reading the page is dealing with the newspaper's own contest operation rather than a separate polling vendor. That arrangement matters for trust: the masthead on the contest is the same masthead locals already know from daily news coverage.

When Did the Best of Howard Voting Window Open and Close?

The fully dated cycle is 2025. That round carried the printed window: voting opened on June 15, 2025 and closed on June 29, 2025.

Beyond that anchor, the program's edition history reaches 2025 and 2026, which marks the ballot as a recurring yearly event rather than a lone experiment. Outside corroboration agrees: a family law firm's news page describes being recognized "either as the winner or honorable mention" in the Baltimore Sun's Annual "Best of Howard County" contest, and a martial arts instructor's professional profile credits the Baltimore Sun with naming his school Best Martial Arts and Best Gym in 2023, 2025, and 2026, along with Best of Howard recognition in 2022 and 2024.

Gaps stay open all the same. The ballot carries no published category lineup, no stated ceiling on repeat voting and no eligibility terms for supporters; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Nothing public fixes the 2026 round's own open and close dates, and a possible 2027 edition has no posted schedule either, so any planning beyond the 2025 anchor depends on what The Baltimore Sun prints next on the live ballot.

How Does Voting Work on the Best of Howard Ballot?

The program's mechanic is a public vote. Whoever reaches the Second Street ballot while the round is live can back a favorite, and standing in the field rises with support rather than with expert judgment. No paid tier appears on the voting page, and no entry charge attaches to casting a vote.

Day to day, a supporter opens the ballot, looks through the category groups on display, selects a nominee and follows the submission prompts the page provides. Details such as whether a sign-in or an email handoff sits between the choice and the counted vote are not spelled out publicly, so the live page remains the authority on those specifics. Supporters who want the shortest path simply arrive, choose and submit; everything else on the page serves discovery.

Phones and the voting experience

Nothing about Best of Howard asks a supporter to install anything. The Baltimore Sun serves the ballot as an ordinary browser page on its Second Street tenant, so the same tab that opens the newspaper's site opens the vote, and a handset screen handles the category groups and submission prompts exactly as a desktop monitor does. Because the whole round lives at one address, baltimoresun.secondstreetapp.com/Best-of-Howard-2025/, a supporter can move between devices mid-window without losing a pick.

Merchants treat the round as a mobilizing moment. In the 2025 cycle, the Savage Mill shopping destination rallied its visitors with a simple plea to "help your favorite Savage Mill spots rise to the top," a window into how local tenants turn everyday foot traffic into ballot support.

How Does Best of Howard Stack Up Against Other Maryland Reader Ballots?

Maryland's reader-vote scene is busy, and Best of Howard holds its own corner of it. Several sibling programs covering neighboring audiences sit alongside it:

• Best of Baltimore, Baltimore Magazine's citywide reader ballot.
• Baltimore Style Readers' Choice, the readership poll from Baltimore Style.
• Baltimore Sun's Best, a separate ballot that shares Best of Howard's publisher but runs under its own banner and page.
• Baltimore's Child Readers' Choice Awards, the family-facing franchise under the Baltimore's Child name.
• Best of Annapolis, published by What's Up Media.
• Best of Frederick, the Frederick News Post's community favorites ballot.

The closest relative is Baltimore Sun's Best, since both bear the same masthead; the difference is the market each ballot speaks to, and a business chasing broad Baltimore exposure would treat them as complementary entries rather than substitutes. Each program keeps its own dates, its own categories and its own winners, so results never transfer between them.

What distinguishes Best of Howard is scale of place: its honors attach to the Howard business community specifically, so a win resonates with neighbors and local customers instead of a diffuse metro-wide electorate. For a nominated firm, that concentration cuts both ways, shrinking the competition pool while raising the value of every supporter who actually shows up to vote.

How Can a Business Rally Support During the Best of Howard Round?

The round is short, and a campaign that waits for the closing stretch forfeits most of it. Open strong: announce the nomination the day the ballot goes live, hand supporters the direct link, and name the precise category so nobody guesses where to click.

The Savage Mill tenants demonstrated the pattern during the 2025 cycle by pushing their own shoppers toward the ballot. Organic outreach of that kind is the baseline; guides such as this walkthrough on strengthening a contest campaign cover messaging, timing and follow-up in depth.

Some campaigns also weigh purchased support, and the sensible sequence is to read the organizer's terms first, then judge options such as paid vote packages against them. Whichever path a campaign takes, the newspaper's published conditions remain the final word on what counts toward the result.