Daily Gazette Best of the Best 2025: How Voting Works & How to Win

An upstate newspaper ballot in a state full of downstate readers-choice programs

Most readers-choice ballots attached to New York State in this guide's family are downstate: Best of Brooklyn, Best of Queens, Best of the Bronx, Best of Westchester and the citywide program all draw their identity from the five boroughs and the counties just north of them. The Daily Gazette Best of the Best 2025 sits on the other side of that divide. Its publisher, The Daily Gazette, is an independent, family-owned daily newspaper published in Schenectady, so the businesses competing on this ballot answer to an upstate readership rather than a metropolitan one.

That difference shows up in the platform setup as well. The ballot runs on Second Street at dailygazette.secondstreetapp.com, the same host the paper uses for its sweepstakes promotions, and the 2025 edition is registered there as a Ballot/NominationAndVotingBallot. In practice that means a supporter nominates and votes inside one combined form instead of moving between two separate pages. A combined structure of this kind is not unusual for Second Street, but it matters for a small business, because getting nominated in the right category is step one of every campaign.

The table below pulls the confirmed facts about the program together.

What the confirmed dates say, and what the organizer leaves unpublished

Editions are confirmed for 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025, each with its own address on the Second Street host and the year written into the path. The oldest confirmed window in that run began on July 17, 2022, and the 2025 edition opened on July 13, 2025 and closed on September 15, 2025. A mid-July opening followed by a mid-September close is therefore the shape of the cycle the confirmed dates support, and it gives a business roughly two months of open voting rather than a short sprint.

A successor ballot also sits on the same host. It is listed as Best of the Best 2026, a combined Ballot/NominationAndVotingBallot promotion that opened on July 12, 2026 and is marked open, which keeps the program's pattern of mid-July starts intact without anyone having to guess at it. Whether the paper runs an edition in 2027 is not yet published.

Two things the organizer has not printed deserve equal weight. The ballot's category lineup is absent from the published material, so no count and no names of categories can be stated here, and nothing about vote frequency, eligibility or the nomination deadline appears either; both of those are details to confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The absence matters in one specific way: a business planning its campaign cannot know from the published material whether repeat daily voting is allowed, and that single unknown shapes more strategy than any other missing rule.

How a supporter actually votes on this Second Street ballot

Nothing about the mechanic is complicated. A supporter opens the year-specific address on dailygazette.secondstreetapp.com, the address ending in the year of the edition they want to vote in. Because the promotion is a combined Ballot/NominationAndVotingBallot, the same page handles both halves of the cycle: if a business is not yet listed in a category, the supporter can nominate it there, and once it appears, the same supporter selects it to cast a vote. There is no separate nomination form to find and no second site to visit.

Second Street ballots of this type typically ask a voter to register an email before the vote is counted, and that registration is what stops a ballot from being a free-for-all, though the specific registration requirement for this promotion is not printed in the published material and the rules shown on the ballot page itself are what govern. What the published material does confirm is the boundary of the window: voting was live from July 13 through September 15, 2025, and a ballot outside that span shows a closed state or hands the supporter the current edition instead.

One practical trap is worth naming because the host makes it easy. The Daily Gazette's Second Street organization carries several promotions at once, including numbered sweepstakes with their own dates, so a supporter who searches casually can land on a sweepstakes entry form instead of the ballot. Typing the ballot address with the correct year at the end is the reliable route, and the 2026 address is the one a supporter should use until the paper publishes otherwise.

How this ballot compares with its New York neighbours

This guide's New York family contains six sibling programs, and each differs from the Daily Gazette ballot in publisher, geography or both. Best of Brooklyn and Best of Queens are borough-scoped, the Bronx runs its own program separately, Best of Westchester answers to a county magazine, Best of Hudson Valley answers to a regional magazine, and the citywide program spans all of it. The Daily Gazette ballot is the only one anchored to Schenectady and the only one whose publisher is a family-owned daily newspaper in upstate New York.

The comparison matters less as a ranking than as a warning about mixed-up searches. All of these ballots live on vote-driven platforms, and a business owner in Schenectady who searches for a generic "best of New York voting" phrase can easily find a downstate program first. A vote cast on a downstate sibling does nothing for a Schenectady business, and a nomination filed on the wrong program is simply wasted effort. Each program's page is linked below so the right one can be checked quickly.

What this ballot shares with its siblings is the readers-choice logic: local businesses win because their customers show up and vote, and the organizer's job is to publish a fair window rather than to pick winners. On confirmed dates alone, this program has run that window every year from 2022 onward, which is a steadier history than a first-year ballot can offer a business deciding where to invest outreach effort.

Strengthening support while the window is open

Because the combined ballot handles nomination and voting in one place, the highest-value move for a Schenectady-area business is confirming it is nominated in the correct category early, then spending the long open stretch, two months in the confirmed 2025 cycle, on customer reminders rather than a last-week push. Ask in person at the register, include the ballot address in receipts and email newsletters, and time the biggest reminder to the week before the September close. The organizer has printed no policy on outside vote help for this promotion, so the safe reading is that votes must be genuine customer actions on the live ballot. Our page on how to get more votes online covers outreach that works within a ballot's own rules, and our notes on what is legal when buying votes explain why the organizer's terms, not general law, set the line here.