Favorites Of The Foothills 2026: How Voting Works & How to Win

What Favorites Of The Foothills is and who runs it

Favorites Of The Foothills 2026 is the latest confirmed round of a readers' choice awards program operated by Tryon Daily Bulletin, a newspaper published in North Carolina. The paper describes it as its annual Favorites of the Foothills Reader's Choice Awards, in which readers choose their favorite local businesses, individuals and organizations. That wording comes from the organizer's own announcement of the 2026 results, which reported thousands of ballots cast.

The ballot itself is hosted on Second Street, a contest platform widely used by newspapers for readers' choice and best-of programs. Tryon Daily Bulletin runs the ballot from its own account at tryondailybulletin2.secondstreetapp.com, the same account that carries the paper's quarterly sweepstakes. The ballot type is recorded as Ballot/NominationAndVotingBallot, meaning nomination and voting happen through the same form rather than as two separate events.

In the vertical taxonomy this is a best-of program in the business category: the entries being voted on are local enterprises and community figures, and the audience is the paper's readership in the North Carolina foothills region the program name refers to. The table below pulls those confirmed details together.

Because the organizer is a single newspaper with a single named program, there is no ambiguity about who answers for the rules: Tryon Daily Bulletin sets them, publishes them on its own ballot, and announces the winners through its own channels.

The dated record: confirmed editions and windows

The program has two confirmed runs so far. The 2025 edition ran on the paper's Second Street account from April 29, 2025 to July 7, 2025. The 2026 edition followed a year later, opening on May 1, 2026 and closing on August 1, 2026. Both editions used the Ballot/NominationAndVotingBallot format, and both are listed as closed, so neither window is currently accepting votes.

Those two confirmed years are what make the program a recurring fixture instead of a single event. The organizer's own language backs this up: its 2026 results announcement calls Favorites of the Foothills the paper's annual readers' choice awards. On that pattern the next expected round is the 2027 edition, though no 2027 launch date, opening day or closing day has been published anywhere.

The two windows are not identical. The 2025 round ran from late April into early July, while the 2026 round opened a few days later in May and closed nearly a month later in August. Anyone planning around a future edition should therefore treat the season rather than any single date as fixed, and read the dates off the live ballot when it opens.

What the organizer has not published in any summary is the field-level detail of the ballot: the full category roster, any rule about repeat submissions, and the eligibility terms for nominees. All of that lives on the ballot form itself, so the page for the round actually running is the only place its rules appear.

How a supporter votes on this ballot

Voting happens through a single form that covers both stages, hosted on the paper's Second Street account. To take part, a reader brings up the edition's page, works through the fields it presents, and for each one either writes in a business, individual or organization during the nomination stage or selects from entries already listed during the voting stage. The form is submitted from the ballot page itself.

Because the platform lists this as a Ballot/NominationAndVotingBallot, a first-time visitor should expect the early portion of the window to lean toward nominating and the later portion toward choosing among listed entries. The exact behaviour of any given round, including whether write-ins stay open for the whole window, is controlled by the organizer's settings on the form, so whatever the form itself says is the authority.

Practical points a supporter can rely on: the ballot is public, meaning ordinary readers participate without any special registration implied by the organizer's description of readers casting thousands of ballots; the window runs for months, so there is no single-day rush; and the deadline is hard, with the 2026 round closing on August 1, 2026 and results announced afterward by the newspaper.

What is not visible in any summary is the fine print: whether a single reader may submit more than once, whether an account or email verification is required, and any residency or age eligibility. Those terms sit on the live form, and they can change between editions, as the shift in window dates between 2025 and 2026 already shows.

How this ballot sits beside its North Carolina neighbours

North Carolina has an unusually busy best-of landscape, and Favorites Of The Foothills occupies a specific lane in it. It is a regional readers' choice program run by a single local newspaper for its own readership, focused on the foothills area the name refers to, rather than a statewide or big-city survey. Other pages on this site cover the neighbouring programs:

Best of North Carolina, a statewide best-of ballot; Charlotte Magazine Best of the Best Awards, the big-market metro equivalent; Daily Reflector Best Of Pitt County, another newspaper-run county program; Fayetteville Community's Choice Awards; Best of Chowan County; and the Carolina Great Pyrenees Rescue Calendar Photo Contest, a niche photo ballot rather than a business survey.

What separates Favorites Of The Foothills from every one of those is the combination of a small-paper host, a multi-month spring-to-summer window, and the combined nomination-and-voting format. The statewide and metro ballots each answer to their own publisher with their own calendars, and a business cannot carry its standing from one into another. A foothills enterprise that wants readers' choice recognition competes on this ballot specifically, under Tryon Daily Bulletin's rules and Second Street's form, on the dates the paper prints for the edition in question.

For a supporter, that means the practical advice differs from program to program: the window, the categories and the rules that matter are always this ballot's own.

Strengthening support for a local favorite in this program

This ballot rewards organized, public participation during its multi-month window. Because the 2026 round ran from May through August, a business or its supporters had a long runway, and the supporters who did best were the ones who treated the ballot link as a standing part of their outreach: posted at the counter, shared on the business's own channels, and repeated as the deadline approached. The organizer's announcement of thousands of ballots cast shows the audience is real and reachable.

Tryon Daily Bulletin has not published a summary of its rules on outside help, so any campaign that goes beyond asking real supporters to vote should be checked against the terms printed on the live form before it starts. That is the honest boundary: the newspaper sets the rules, and its ballot page is the only place the current ones appear in full.

For a structured look at methods that work on public ballots of this kind, see our votes guide at how to get more votes online, and for how purchased votes fit into that picture, the award votes page covers the general mechanics without any promise about this or any other specific ballot.