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

Four confirmed editions: Schenectady's own paper runs this ballot in-house

2022, 2023, 2024, 2025. That is the entire confirmed run of Daily Gazette Best of the Best, all four editions hosted at the same address, dailygazette.secondstreetapp.com, on the Second Street platform that the newspaper itself operates rather than a separate contractor's own branded site.

Daily Gazette is an independent, family-owned daily newspaper published in Schenectady, New York. Its most recently confirmed edition combined nominating and voting into one ballot rather than running them as two separate stages, opening July 13 and closing September 15, 2025. Once that stretch ends, the trail runs cold: Daily Gazette hasn't set out which categories apply, hasn't fixed how many times a supporter may vote, and hasn't locked in a date for the next round.

Four straight years is a real pattern, not a guess, but it's still a pattern for the window's timing alone. Confirm on the live ballot each cycle for anything past those dates, since Daily Gazette hasn't locked in the rest.

A single paper's own ballot, not a shared statewide franchise

Some New York "best of" ballots run through a syndicated network that repeats an identical format city after city. Daily Gazette Best of the Best isn't one of those: it's Schenectady's own newspaper running its own Second Street market, answerable to nobody else's results.

Why that separation actually matters to a nomination

None of those six borough- or region-wide ballots shares a judging process or a results page with Schenectady's own count, and doing well on one carries no weight toward any other. A search for "New York best of the best" has a real chance of surfacing a borough page or a regional magazine instead of Daily Gazette's own Schenectady ballot, so typing the confirmed address directly beats trusting whatever ranks first.

Schenectady sits inside a wider Capital Region market

Schenectady is one of the anchor cities of New York's Capital Region, on the Mohawk River a short distance from where it meets the Hudson. The Daily Gazette's own coverage area reaches well past the city's own limits into the towns that share its daily commercial life.

Scotia and Rotterdam sit directly across the Mohawk and along its southern bank, both close enough that residents routinely shop and dine in Schenectady rather than only in their own town centers. Niskayuna and Glenville, further along that same river corridor, and Colonie, toward Albany, round out a shopping and dining market that a Schenectady-area business realistically competes in day to day.

Nothing in what Daily Gazette has published draws a boundary at any of those town lines, and a ballot titled around Schenectady is not obviously closed to a business a few minutes outside it.

Four editions of history is worth using, not wasting on a late push

A ballot with four straight confirmed years, 2022 through 2025, has already shown it isn't a one-off promotion Daily Gazette might drop next season. That history is worth building on early in a window rather than saving everything for the final days before a date like September 15.

Running for four straight years doesn't change what actually moves a ballot: genuine supporters, reached in person and asked again, beat a single automated push saved for the last day. Second Street's fraud screening covers every market it hosts, and a business caught here would put a longer confirmed history on the line than a brand-new page ever would.

A nomination only opens the door; Daily Gazette alone decides who wins once its own count finishes. is buying votes legal separates a safe campaign from a reckless one, and award-vote campaign planning covers the specific readers'-choice format this ballot uses.