Best of the Finger Lakes Community's Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Finger Lakes Community's Choice Awards is and who runs it

The Best of the Finger Lakes Community's Choice Awards works as a public-vote readers' choice competition that honors the top businesses and organizations of the Finger Lakes area of New York. The market is anchored on Canandaigua, the small city at the heart of the Finger Lakes region, and the ballot draws nominees from across the surrounding area rather than from one downtown strip.

The organizer is a Gannett / USA TODAY Network local paper, and the ballot page carries the USA TODAY NETWORK Ventures copyright line, which places the program inside the same family of readers' choice contests Gannett publishes in other markets. Your Choice Awards hosts the voting itself, the platform Gannett markets use for this contest format.

Scale is real here. The program's own text says it recognizes more than 420 businesses and organizations each year, spread across a long list of categories. That makes it one of the broader community choice ballots in New York State, even though the market it serves is far smaller than the city programs further down this page.

Facts at a glance

The dated record for the Finger Lakes Community's Choice Awards

Confirmed editions of this program ran in 2025 and 2026, both carried on Your Choice Awards. The 2026 cycle carries the full published calendar, and it runs in three phases.

Nominations opened the cycle, running June 8 to 29, 2026. Businesses and organizations were entered during this phase, and entering carried an incentive: a chance to win a $250 prize. When nominations closed, the top companies in each category moved on to the voting round, which ran August 14 to 28, 2026. After voting closed, the calendar set the winners announcement for November 8, 2026.

That three-phase shape, early-summer nominations, a two-week August voting window, and a fall reveal, is the rhythm a supporter should expect from this program. The 2025 edition is confirmed as having run, but its phase dates are not part of the published calendar for the current cycle.

One gap matters for anyone planning a support push. The ballot spells out its daily voting frequency, but it does not publish eligibility criteria for nominees or any restrictions on who may cast a vote beyond that limit; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Everything else a supporter needs, the phases, the dates and the frequency rule, is printed on the ballot itself.

How a supporter votes in the Finger Lakes awards today

This ballot's mechanic is a plain public vote with one published constraint: each category, each day, one choice. That sentence, drawn from the program's own text, defines both the opportunity and the ceiling for every business in the running.

In practice a supporter's round looks like this. During the August voting window, open the Finger Lakes ballot on Your Choice Awards, find the category where your chosen business sits among the finalists, select it and submit. Because the limit is per category rather than per visit, the same supporter can vote for a favorite restaurant, a favorite salon and a favorite plumber in one sitting, then come back the next day and do it all again.

For a business, that daily structure turns support into a campaign of reminders rather than a single announcement. A two-week window rewards the nominee whose customers hear about the ballot repeatedly: a register-side sign in week one, a follow-up post mid-window, a last-call message before August 28. The businesses that win this program are usually the ones that made the daily return effortless for their customers.

There is no paid voting tier on this ballot. Support is earned through participation, one category at a time, one day at a time.

Where the Finger Lakes ballot sits among New York's readers' choice programs

This program is the Finger Lakes member of a wider New York family of readers' choice ballots, most of them covering far denser markets. The siblings confirmed alongside it are Best of Brooklyn, Best of Hudson Valley, The City's Best, Best of New York City, Best of Queens, Best of the Bronx and Best of Westchester.

The difference is the shape of the market. The five city and suburban programs compete inside boroughs and counties where millions of readers are a subway ride from the nominees. The Finger Lakes edition serves a regional market anchored on Canandaigua, where a winning business might be a lakefront restaurant or a Main Street shop known to a much smaller but far more loyal customer base.

That changes the arithmetic of a support push. In a borough-wide ballot, a business needs volume across a huge population. In the Finger Lakes edition, a long category list splits the field, so a well-organized customer base in a single town can genuinely decide a category. The program's own claim of recognizing more than 420 businesses and organizations each year shows how widely the honors spread.

For a supporter comparing New York ballots, the practical takeaway is that this program rewards depth of local support over raw reach, and its August window is the time to act.

Strengthening support in the Finger Lakes Community's Choice Awards

Every advantage in this program comes from the daily rule. A supporter may vote once a day per category during the August round, so a business that asks each customer for a single daily vote across the full window multiplies its support fourteen-fold without anyone breaking a rule. The organizer's structure invites exactly that habit.

Make the ask specific: name the category, name the business, give the link, and ask for a return every day until August 28. Vague requests produce one vote and fade. A counter sign at the register, a pinned post with the direct ballot link, and a mid-window reminder cover most of what a small business needs.

For support beyond your own customer list, our award votes page explains the options for award-style ballots like this one, and what the organizer's rules mean for any outside help. Whatever route you take, the once-a-day-per-category limit is the frame: support that respects it is the support this ballot is built to count.