2026 Best of the Best: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the 2026 Best of the Best is and who runs it

2026 Best of the Best is the annual readers' ballot published by the Delta Democrat-Times, the daily newspaper serving Greenville and the wider Mississippi Delta from its newsroom at 627 Washington Ave. in Greenville, Mississippi. The paper operates under Emmerich Newspapers, Inc., which holds the copyright line printed on the ballot site, and it runs this program as part of its coverage of local business life. The vertical is a best-of contest: readers put forward and then vote for favorite businesses, which is why the page's own vocabulary centers on "Best" phrases rather than on teams, athletes or shows.

Instead of a third-party polling service, the newspaper carries the ballot on its own website. The voting address is https://www.ddtonline.com/2026bestofthebest, and opening that address takes a supporter straight to the live 2026 edition. Because the paper hosts the vote itself, every instruction, nomination form and rule a supporter encounters comes from the Delta Democrat-Times rather than from an outside platform.

For a supporter in Greenville or the surrounding Delta communities, the practical shape is simple: one newspaper, one website, one awards ballot, and a public vote that decides which businesses carry the title for the cycle.

The dated history behind the Delta Democrat-Times ballot

Confirmed editions of the Best of the Best ran in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2024, 2025 and 2026. The program is annual in character, and the recurrence pattern behind those years points to a following edition in 2027. The run is not unbroken on paper: the confirmed years skip from 2020 to 2024, so the franchise's history is a set of confirmed cycles rather than a claim that every single year produced a ballot. A published reference to earlier rounds reads "Delta Democrat Times 2018, 2019, 2020, 2025 Best of the Best Award, Best Realtor and Best Agency", which shows the paper anchoring the award to those cycles by name.

The 2026 edition is the one live now, carried at the paper's own address for the program. What the Delta Democrat-Times has not printed on that page is the schedule: the paper has not stated when the 2026 round opens or closes, and nothing has been published about limits on repeat votes by a single person or about eligibility; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

That gap matters for planning. A business that wants to campaign for the title cannot schedule pushes against a published window, because the newspaper has not put one on the ballot page. The practical course is to watch the Delta Democrat-Times site and its announcements, and to treat the live forms as the only source for whatever timing and rules govern the current round.

How a supporter takes part in the 2026 Best of the Best

Supporters take part through the vote the paper runs on its own website. To cast a ballot, a supporter opens the ddtonline.com address for the program, works through the categories the Delta Democrat-Times has open for the cycle, and submits a choice through the forms the newspaper itself provides. Nothing about that sequence depends on an outside polling platform, because the paper carries the whole program on its own domain.

One caution belongs here. The ballot page does not present a finished roster of every category and nominee in advance; the Delta Democrat-Times has not published a complete category list. Businesses reach the ballot through the paper's nomination forms, so the field a supporter sees takes its shape from the live cycle rather than from a fixed list printed ahead of voting.

The same holds for the voting rules. Whether the paper allows one vote per supporter per day, whether an email address is needed, and whether a supporter can return repeatedly are all governed by the forms on the page, not by any standing rule text the Delta Democrat-Times has published alongside the ballot. A supporter who wants certainty about how many times a vote counts should read the submission form itself before casting anything.

What is fixed is the address and the host. The 2026 Best of the Best lives at the paper's own program URL, under the masthead of the Delta Democrat-Times, and the paper's name on the page is the assurance that a vote is going to the real Greenville franchise rather than to an imitation.

Where this ballot sits among Mississippi's best-of programs

The Delta Democrat-Times' ballot is one of several reader-vote programs running in Mississippi, and each answers to its own publisher. The Best of Coastal Mississippi serves the Gulf coast, the Best of the Best Jackson covers the capital market under the Clarion Ledger, and the Best of Mississippi runs as a statewide franchise. Those three do not share this paper's ballot, and this paper's ballot does not share theirs.

Closer to the college towns, the Best of Oxford belongs to the Oxford Eagle, and the Daily Journal Readers Choice (Tupelo) serves northeast Mississippi through the Daily Journal in Tupelo. Television adds its own vote: the 2026 WXXV Viewer's Choice Awards is a broadcaster's program, not a newspaper's.

What sets the 2026 Best of the Best apart is that it is the Delta Democrat-Times' own franchise for its home market. The paper in Greenville hosts the vote on ddtonline.com under the Emmerich Newspapers masthead, and decides its categories and forms without an outside platform. A business in the Delta competes on the paper's ballot; a business in Jackson, Oxford or Tupelo competes somewhere else entirely, because each program is its own publisher's contest with its own market drawn around it.

Strengthening support in a newspaper-hosted vote

Support in this program is won the way a Greenville business wins any Delta audience: by asking the people who already walk through the door. Taking part means a public vote on the paper's own site, so a customer who is willing can cast a ballot in minutes at the Delta Democrat-Times address. Put the ballot link where customers already look, on counter cards, receipts and the shop's social posts, and tie the ask to something concrete, such as a checkout interaction or a follow-up order email.

Timing is the hard part, because the paper has not published the window for the 2026 round. A business that waits for a printed schedule will miss the start, so the workable approach is to build the ask into regular customer contact from the moment the ballot goes live and keep it there while the round runs.

The Delta Democrat-Times publishes no rule text on outside assistance in this contest, so treat the paper's live terms as the only authority. Our guide to getting more votes online sets out the tactics that fit a locally hosted contest like this one, from mobilizing staff to making the ask at the point of sale, without assuming any rule the newspaper has not stated.