Best of 716: How Voting Works & How to Win

What Best of 716 is and who runs it

Best of 716 is the readers' choice program of The Buffalo News, the daily newspaper serving Buffalo, New York. The name borrows the 716 telephone area code, which locals use as shorthand for the Buffalo region, and the ballot asks readers to name their favorite local businesses, places and services across that market. The format is the classic best-of shape: the newspaper publishes a slate of categories, local businesses are nominated, and readers vote for the ones they want to see recognized.

The organizer is a newspaper, not a promotions company. The Buffalo News publishes from its newsroom in Buffalo and carries the ballot on buffalonews.com, its own domain, under the exclusive readers' choice section. That matters for anyone evaluating the program: the voting page, the rules and the results all live under the same masthead, and the newspaper's own reputation in the Buffalo market is behind the contest.

The current voting page is the 2026 ballot at buffalonews.com/exclusive/readerschoice/ballot-2026/. A 2025 edition of the ballot is also on file at the same section of the site, which shows the program repeats rather than running once.

The dated facts behind Best of 716

Two cycles of Best of 716 are on file, one from 2025 and one from 2026. The 2025 ballot ran at buffalonews.com under the readers' choice section, and the 2026 ballot is the live voting page now. The program's own recurrence points to a 2027 cycle as the expected next run, though nothing beyond the two years on file should be assumed until the newspaper posts it.

No printed window exists on the page. The ballot page carries no open or close dates for the 2026 round and no nomination-round dates either; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. That gap is worth taking seriously for planning: a business that wants to mobilize customers cannot know from the page alone how long the runway is, only that the ballot is open while it is posted.

The category roster is in the same position. The ballot page groups nominations into categories covering the Buffalo market, but the newspaper has not published a category list outside the live ballot itself, so the fields in play for 2026 are visible only on the voting page. Anyone comparing this cycle with the 2025 edition should read both ballots directly rather than assume the slate carried over unchanged.

One dated fact is firm: the 2026 ballot is live at buffalonews.com/exclusive/readerschoice/ballot-2026/ today, which means the current round is underway. Everything else about timing flows from that page.

How a supporter votes in Best of 716 today

Best of 716 voting happens on a public ballot the newspaper publishes itself. To take part, a supporter opens the 2026 page at buffalonews.com, browses the category groups, picks a nominated Buffalo business in a category and submits the pick. The rule The Buffalo News states on its voting pages is explicit: users are allowed one vote per day, per category. That phrasing does two things at once. It caps each supporter at a single vote in any given category on any given day, and it explicitly allows a return the next day to vote again.

Read together, the rule makes the daily return the core action of the program. A supporter who follows several categories can cast one vote in each today, and the same again tomorrow. Over the length of the window, a business whose customers build that habit accumulates support at the maximum rate the ballot allows, while a one-time push on a single day leaves most of that capacity unused.

Nothing on the ballot page indicates an account requirement for voting, and the newspaper has not published an eligibility statement for voters beyond the frequency rule. The Buffalo News site carries subscriber log-in prompts elsewhere, but the voting rule it publishes concerns frequency, not reader status. If that ever changes, the change will appear on the live ballot, which is the single page where the newspaper states how its readers' choice vote works.

Where Best of 716 sits among New York best-of ballots

Best of 716 is the Buffalo entry in a crowded New York field of readers' choice programs. Six sibling ballots cover downstate markets: Best of Brooklyn, Best of Queens, Best of the Bronx, The City's Best, Best of New York City, Best of Hudson Valley and Best of Westchester. Every one of them belongs to a different publisher, and no shared ballot connects them to Best of 716.

What distinguishes the Buffalo program is its organizer and its geography. The Buffalo News is the major daily newspaper of the Buffalo region, and the 716 branding ties the ballot to the area code that identifies the region, giving it a tighter local identity than a citywide or countywide label. The downstate siblings, by contrast, split the New York City market borough by borough under separate publishers, and the Hudson Valley and Westchester programs cover suburban corridors.

For a business, the practical consequence is that support is not transferable. A restaurant nominated in Best of 716 gains nothing from a Brooklyn ballot win, and a customer base in Queens cannot vote in the Buffalo program. Every ballot has separate categories, a separate window and separate rules, so any multi-market business has to run separate outreach for each program it enters, starting from the live ballot page of the market in question.

Building support within the Best of 716 rules

Everything about outreach in Best of 716 starts from the frequency rule The Buffalo News publishes: one vote per day, per category. That rule rewards consistency, not bursts. A Buffalo business that asks each customer once gets one vote; a business that asks customers to come back daily, and reminds them where the ballot lives, multiplies the same goodwill across the whole window.

Beyond its frequency rule, the newspaper publishes no statement on outside vote help, so the safe reading is the literal one: support that fits inside one vote per day, per category, is what the ballot is designed to measure. Anything that inflates a single day's count past that limit does not fit the ballot's own terms. For a grounded overview of outreach methods that work with daily-vote ballots, see our guide on getting more votes online.

Practical tactics follow from the mechanic. Put the ballot link where customers already look, ask at the register, and time reminders for the days remaining in the window once the close date is visible on the live page. Because the category roster is only on the ballot itself, confirm which categories your business appears in before launching a push, so supporters land on the right field the first time.