Best of SJ Readers' Poll: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Best of SJ Readers' Poll is and who runs it

The Best of SJ Readers' Poll is a best-of ballot run by South Jersey Magazine, a regional publication whose masthead reads SJ Mag Media. The program celebrates the businesses, food, services and local institutions that readers of the magazine rate highest, and the magazine frames it with its own line: honoring everything that makes South Jersey a great place to live, work & play, according to the readers themselves.

Unlike many readers'-choice programs that hand their ballots to a national contest platform, this one is hosted directly on the publisher's domain. The 2026 voting page lives at sjmagazine.net under a dedicated voting address, which means the rules, the deadline and the results all come from the magazine itself rather than from a third-party vendor. For a South Jersey business that lands on the ballot, that matters: there is no intermediary platform with its own terms layered between the publication and its readers.

The market is South Jersey, New Jersey, the region the magazine has covered under its own name. The poll is a public-vote program in the best-of vertical: readers nominate or simply find their favorites on the ballot, then vote for them during the published window. The facts a nominee needs most are gathered below.

The dated record: editions, deadlines and what is not published

Two editions of the Best of SJ Readers' Poll stand on confirmed ground: the 2023 poll and the 2026 poll. Both carry the magazine's own "Cast Your Vote" framing on sjmagazine.net, and the 2026 cycle is the live edition, with its own dedicated voting page. The program qualifies as annual on the strength of those edition years, and a 2027 cycle is the reasonable expectation for a publication running a readers' poll on a yearly rhythm.

The hard date in the 2026 cycle is the close: voting ends July 31 at 5 pm. That deadline is printed on the ballot page itself, and it is the number a nominated business should plan its entire supporter push around, because a ballot cast after 5 pm on July 31 counts for nothing in this cycle.

What the magazine has not printed matters just as much to a nominee. No opening date for the 2026 voting window appears on the ballot page. No full category roster is published outside the ballot itself, and the category lines the page does mention, such as the best bagels in town, sit alongside the note that the poll spans everything in between. No rule on how many times one supporter may vote, no eligibility terms and no cap on participation have been announced for this poll; the gap is real for any business building a campaign, so confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How a supporter votes in the Best of SJ Readers' Poll today

The mechanic a supporter performs is deliberately plain. The ballot lives on the magazine's own domain, so a reader opens sjmagazine.net, reaches the 2026 Best of SJ Readers' Poll voting page, and works through the category lines printed there. Each line asks for a favorite in a South Jersey category, from food to services, and the reader submits those picks as a public vote. No account wall, external platform or separate registration step is part of the published flow; the ballot and the submission live on the same page.

Because the host is the publisher itself, the supporter's experience is shaped by the magazine rather than by a contest vendor. The page carries the SJ Mag Media masthead, the same editorial framing the publication uses for its coverage, and the deadline of July 31 at 5 pm printed where a voter cannot miss it. A reader who wants to support a particular business, a dentist, a bagel shop, a contractor, simply finds that category and casts the vote for it.

For a nominated business, the practical takeaway is that every barrier between a customer and a completed ballot is low. The vote happens on the site customers already know, in a single sitting, before the stated close. That is why clear instructions matter: tell supporters exactly which category to find and remind them the ballot closes July 31 at 5 pm, and the conversion from goodwill to counted vote rises sharply.

How this ballot sits beside its New Jersey neighbours

South Jersey Magazine's poll is not alone in the New Jersey best-of field, and a business nominated across several programs should know how they differ. The Asbury Park Press Readers' Choice runs at the Shore's northern end under a national newspaper group. The Best of Bergen Community's Choice Awards and the Bergen & Morris Top Dentists serve the northern counties, while the Best of Jersey Shore Contest and the Jersey Bites Monmouth County Readers' Choice cover the coastline and Monmouth County dining. The statewide Best of New Jersey program rounds out the set.

What sets the Best of SJ Readers' Poll apart is its host. The publisher keeps the ballot under its own roof, with no shared contest platform, and its geography is the magazine's home region in the southern part of the state, a different customer base from Bergen, Morris or Monmouth. A South Jersey restaurant or dentist that also appears on a statewide ballot is competing for overlapping readers but under separate rules, deadlines and category structures in each program.

For that reason, support built for this poll does not transfer automatically. Each ballot answers to its own publisher, its own closing date and its own category list, and the July 31 at 5 pm close here binds only this ballot.

Strengthening support in this poll without guessing at the rules

A business on the Best of SJ ballot works with a short, known runway: the voting close on July 31 at 5 pm, on a ballot published by South Jersey Magazine itself. Because the magazine has not published a rulebook on outside help, the safe ground is support that comes from real customers who can actually reach the ballot at sjmagazine.net. Ask in person at the counter, follow up by email, and name the exact category so a supporter does not have to search for the business on a long ballot.

Timing matters more than volume here. The poll's window closes in late July, so a push left for the final days compresses everything into a scramble. Spreading the ask across the weeks a business knows the ballot is live, then a reminder as July 31 approaches, fits the magazine's own-site mechanic and keeps the campaign honest. Methods that translate across public readers' polls are gathered in our votes guide, and the award-specific considerations sit at buy award votes. What the organizer permits, and what it deletes, is decided on the ballot page itself.