South Haven Best Of: How Voting Works & How to Win

What South Haven Best Of is and who runs it

South Haven Best Of is a readers' choice ballot for the South Haven community in Michigan, run by The Herald-Palladium, a daily newspaper registered in Michigan whose site is heraldpalladium.com. The program sits in the best-of vertical, which means the ballot collects favorites across local businesses, places, people and activities rather than honoring a single field such as music or dining on its own. The printed invitation on the ballot reads: "Tell us your favorite places, people, and activities in South Haven."

Voting is hosted on Second Street, a balloting platform many newspapers use, at the address heraldpalladium.secondstreetapp.com. The current ballot lives at the 2025 South Haven Best Of Ballot page, and that address is the voting link published for this program. The market label carried for the program is St. Joseph, MI, the publisher's own market, while the questions on the ballot itself are aimed squarely at South Haven.

What makes this program distinctive among the Michigan ballots on this site is its scale and its publisher. It answers to a shoreline daily newspaper rather than a metro publisher or a city magazine, and it asks about a single community rather than a whole region. The table below collects the program's fixed details.

The confirmed editions of the South Haven Best Of ballot

Confirmed editions of South Haven Best Of appear for 2018, 2020, 2021, 2024 and 2025, all carried on the heraldpalladium.secondstreetapp.com host. The 2025 edition was live under the title "2025 South Haven Best Of Ballot," and that page carried the nomination call quoted in the section above.

The window for the 2025 cycle sat in October. The ballot page printed that nominations were "happening now through Oct," with no closing day printed alongside that phrase. What the ballot has not printed is a category list, a per-supporter submission frequency or eligibility wording; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Platform round dates, meaning any split the organizer may run between a nominating stage and a final voting stage, are absent from the page as well.

The Herald-Palladium announces each cycle on its own ballot page, so that page is where the open and close dates for the next edition will appear. Because editions show for 2018, 2020, 2021, 2024 and 2025, the program reads as a recurring fixture rather than a debut, though the years between those editions are not all represented, so the published run across the stretch from 2018 to 2025 should be read as intermittent rather than as an unbroken annual streak.

How a supporter votes in the South Haven Best Of ballot today

On the Herald-Palladium's page, the mechanic is a plain public vote. A supporter opens the ballot address, reads the printed call for favorite places, people and activities in South Haven, fills in the fields for the categories displayed, and submits. Because the call asks for favorites to be named by the supporter, the ballot is built around naming what you love in South Haven rather than choosing from a preprinted slate of finalists, at least in the stage the 2025 page described.

The second stage of the question is frequency. Whether the ballot accepts a submission each day, each week or merely a single entry per person is not written anywhere on the page, and the newspaper has published no separate rules document for the program. Whatever the live form states at submission time is the operative rule for that cycle.

Access works the same way. The page does not print whether an account with Second Street or with the Herald-Palladium is needed before submitting, so a supporter should be prepared to follow whatever the form requests. For a reader planning a push on behalf of a South Haven business, the practical conclusion is to visit the ballot early in the October window, read the categories and the submission wording as they actually appear, and build the ask around that live page rather than around assumptions carried over from a previous year's edition.

How the South Haven ballot sits beside its Michigan neighbours

Michigan is well represented on this site, and South Haven Best Of is the odd ballot out in a useful way. The Detroit metro accounts for several of the entries: Detroit Community Choice Awards, Detroit Music Awards, Detroit News Readers' Choice and DN Readers Choice Awards, each answering to its own metro publisher or newsroom. Further west, Grand Rapids Magazine Best of GR belongs to a city magazine, and Best of Northern Michigan covers a broad regional footprint across the northern part of the state.

Against that field, South Haven Best Of is the shoreline community ballot. Its publisher is a daily newspaper with a St. Joseph, MI market label, its questions are about a single town, and its competition is for favorite places, people and activities in South Haven rather than across a metro or a region. For a business, that shape cuts both ways: the pool of rival entries is local rather than statewide, and the supporters who can legitimately vote are people with a real connection to South Haven, which is why a customer-facing ask tends to travel further here than a generic broadcast.

The practical difference for a supporter is that the Detroit and Grand Rapids ballots each carry their own publisher's rules, dates and categories, and nothing on those pages transfers to the Herald-Palladium's ballot. Each program's cycle must be read on its own live page.

Strengthening support in the South Haven Best Of window

The October window is short, so support for a South Haven business has to be organized before the ballot opens. The printed call names places, people and activities, which means a restaurant, a shop, a service provider or a local figure can each be written in wherever they fit the displayed categories. The most effective ask is concrete: give customers the exact Herald-Palladium ballot address, tell them which entry to name, and repeat the request while nominations are open, since a favorite named early survives the whole cycle.

The Herald-Palladium has published no stated policy on outside voting help for this program, so the honest reading is that the ballot's own submission wording is the only rule in force. For a fuller treatment of building genuine support around a small-market readers' ballot, see our votes guide, and for programs structured like this best-of ballot specifically, our award votes page explains the general landscape.