Best of the Pines 2026: How Voting Works & How to Win

What Best of the Pines is and who runs it

Best of the Pines is the readers' choice program that The Pilot Promotions runs for the Southern Pines, North Carolina market. The Pilot, the newspaper behind the organizer, anchors the ballot to its home town, and the promotion sits squarely in the best-of vertical: local businesses and community favorites go head to head across categories that readers themselves fill in during a nomination round.

The 2026 edition runs on Second Street, whose contest platform hosts the ballot at pilot.secondstreetapp.com under the address https://pilot.secondstreetapp.com/Best-of-the-Pines-2026. The format is a nominate-then-vote public ballot: names go in first, the vote follows, and the ballot page is open to any supporter who visits it. The Pilot Promotions also operates other promotions on the same Second Street host, including sweepstakes and raffles tied to the Best of the Pines season, but the ballot itself is a separate promotion with its own window and its own page.

A companion program from the same publisher, The Pilot Cutest Kids and Pets Contest, runs on its own route and does not share this ballot, so a vote in one has no effect on the other. For supporters, the practical picture is simple: the ballot lives at one address, the phases run in sequence, and everything a voter needs sits on the Second Street ballot page. The table below pulls the program's fixed facts into one place.

The dated record for Best of the Pines

Best of the Pines has run every year since 2019, with confirmed editions every year from 2019 through 2026. Each edition has kept the same two-phase shape, a nomination round first and the public vote second, and the run has continued without a break across all eight of those years.

For the 2026 cycle the organizer printed the dates plainly: nominations ran June 1 through 21, and voting opened July 8 and closed July 28. The Second Street listing for the 2026 promotion spans June 1 through July 29 and carries the status closed, which lines up with the printed voting end date once the ballot wraps the month.

What the organizer has left off the ballot pages entirely is the roster of 2026 categories. The site carries a 2026 Category Definitions page and a Behind the scenes of the nominations phase explainer, but the full category list itself is not reproduced in the ballot text; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The rules side is the same: no per-voter cap, no one-vote-per-day clause and no eligibility text appear on the ballot pages for this edition.

Results, by contrast, are published. The ballot site lists Previous Winners, a 2025 Winners section, a 2025 Winners Arts and Community selection and a 2025 Party Pics gallery, so the outcome of the prior cycle is public even where the forward-looking rules are not.

How a supporter votes on the Best of the Pines ballot

Voting in Best of the Pines 2026 happens on the Second Street ballot page itself. A supporter opens https://pilot.secondstreetapp.com/Best-of-the-Pines-2026, and during the voting window the ballot presents the categories in play for that year. Because the program is nominate-then-vote, the June round is when a supporter submits a business or favorite into a category; once the July vote opens, the ballot switches to the voting phase and the nominated entries become the choices.

The organizer's own site includes a Voting Toolkit and Social Media Images for Voting among its resources, which signals that The Pilot expects supporters to share their picks and rally others rather than vote in isolation. The FAQ's about Voting in 2026 page on the ballot site is where the organizer answers its own procedural questions, and that is the right place to look for anything the summary pages do not spell out. Behind the scenes of the nominations phase is another organizer-published explainer, covering how the June round feeds the July ballot.

For the 2026 cycle both phases have already closed, with voting ending July 28, so a supporter reading these pages today is preparing for the next edition rather than casting a vote in this one. The mechanics themselves, from selection through submission, live entirely on the Second Street ballot page and never leave the pilot.secondstreetapp.com address.

Where Best of the Pines sits among North Carolina ballots

Within North Carolina, Best of the Pines shares the best-of vertical with several programs that answer to other publishers. Best of North Carolina takes a statewide scope, while the Charlotte Magazine Best of the Best Awards serves the Charlotte market and the Daily Reflector Best Of Pitt County ties to that paper's readership. Fayetteville Community's Choice Awards and Best of Chowan County round out the community-level ballots, and the Carolina Great Pyrenees Rescue Calendar Photo Contest shows how far the vertical stretches, from business readers' choice into a photo contest for a rescue organization.

What separates Best of the Pines from all of them is its publisher and its town: The Pilot Promotions runs it for Southern Pines, and the ballot has kept its nominate-then-vote shape without a break since 2019. The Pilot also publishes a second contest, The Pilot Cutest Kids and Pets Contest, which shares the newspaper but not the ballot.

For a reader comparing options, the practical difference is geographic. Someone in the Southern Pines area votes here, while the statewide ballot, the Charlotte ballot and the Pitt County ballot each draw their own audiences under their own publishers. The links below lead to each neighbouring program so the comparison can be made directly, category by category and window by window.

Building support for a Best of the Pines nomination

Support in Best of the Pines is built the way the organizer itself suggests. The Pilot publishes a Voting Toolkit and ready-made Social Media Images for Voting, so a business nominated in a category can point its customers to the ballot with materials the newspaper already supplies. Because the vote runs July 8 through 28 after a June nomination round, the practical rally period is the three weeks of voting, and the organizer's FAQ page about voting in 2026 is the authoritative word on what conduct is allowed.

Whatever the live ballot states about repeat voting governs, since no rule on that point is printed in advance. For tactics that travel across public ballots of this kind, see our guide to earning more votes online, and for the legal framing around paid support, our page on whether buying votes is legal sets out the general position. Buying votes for this ballot is not something the organizer endorses; its own toolkit points to organic sharing instead.