Star of the Year '26: How Voting Works & How to Win

What Star of the Year '26 is and who runs it

Star of the Year '26 is a public-vote business ballot run by The Pilot Promotions, the promotions operation tied to The Pilot newspaper in Southern Pines, North Carolina. The ballot sits on Second Street, the contest platform the publisher uses for its other reader promotions, at the pilot.secondstreetapp.com domain under the Star-of-the-Year-26 address. The vertical is best-of: readers back local businesses they already use, rather than entering anything themselves, which places the programme in the same family as the readers-choice ballots other North Carolina publishers run.

The ballot page carries the heading Star of the Spring finals, which tells a visitor the 2026 edition reached a finals stage before it closed. Missing from the page are a category lineup, a rules block and an eligibility statement. That gap matters to the business side of the ballot: a shop or restaurant hoping to plan a support campaign has to work from the dates and the platform's behaviour, because the organizer prints little else. On Second Street's own listing for the publisher's account, the programme appears under the Ballot/VotingBallot type, sitting alongside the publisher's raffles and its Cutest Kids and Pets Contest.

The dated record for this ballot

Star of the Year ran in 2025 and then again in 2026. The platform archive for the publisher's Second Street account holds promotion rows for both years, and each edition sits at its own address: the 2025 ballot at Star-of-the-Year-2025 and the 2026 ballot at Star-of-the-Year-26. That per-year addressing is the clearest structural sign of an annual cycle, and it means a link shared last spring will not reach this year's form.

The 2026 voting window ran from May 23 through May 29, 2026, and the promotion now shows as closed. The broader platform dates for the programme stretch from June 7, 2025 to May 29, 2026, which reads as a cycle that builds across the year and resolves in a short finals week in late May. A 2027 edition is the expected next step, but its window has not been announced anywhere.

Planning a campaign around this ballot means planning around two silences. No category lineup appears on the ballot page, and no rules text covering a per-supporter limit, daily returns or eligibility exists for this programme; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. There is also no published nomination schedule, so whether businesses can put themselves forward or only appear as editorial picks is unknown between cycles.

How a supporter votes today

Voting here is a plain public vote. A supporter heads to the Star-of-the-Year-26 address on pilot.secondstreetapp.com, scans the businesses listed, selects a choice and submits it on the Second Street form. No entry fee and no nomination step sit in front of the voter; the businesses are already on the ballot, and the supporter's whole job is to pick and submit. Because the 2026 window closed on May 29, 2026, anybody arriving now sees the finished ballot rather than a live form.

The page heading, Star of the Spring finals, indicates the ballot a visitor sees is the finals stage of the cycle rather than an opening round. Whether earlier rounds ran on the same address or elsewhere is not published, so a supporter researching mid-cycle should treat the live page as the whole picture.

Two practical unknowns affect the voting experience. The page does not explain whether an email sign-in is required before a vote registers, so a supporter should expect whatever verification the Second Street form presents. And with no printed per-supporter rule, the form's own behaviour at submission time is the only enforcement a voter will actually meet. Anybody hoping to vote again next cycle should complete the form as presented rather than assuming a workaround, and should return under the new year's address once The Pilot Promotions publishes it.

How this ballot sits beside its North Carolina neighbours

North Carolina carries a crowded field of readers-choice ballots, and Star of the Year '26 occupies a distinct corner of it. It is a small-market, business-focused ballot anchored to The Pilot's readership in Southern Pines, whereas Best of North Carolina runs at statewide scale and the Charlotte Magazine Best of the Best Awards answers to a metro readership.

The other neighbours differ in shape as much as in size. The Daily Reflector Best Of Pitt County and Best of Chowan County are county-anchored ballots, the Fayetteville Community's Choice Awards is a city programme, and the Carolina Great Pyrenees Rescue Calendar Photo Contest is a nonprofit photo ballot rather than a business vote at all. None of them shares this ballot's publisher, platform account or window.

What makes Star of the Year distinct within that field is its publisher's local grip: The Pilot Promotions runs the ballot on the same Second Street account that carries its raffles and its Cutest Kids and Pets Contest, so the Star of the Year audience is the paper's own Southern Pines readership. A business deciding where to invest support effort should weigh that concentrated local audience against the larger but more diffuse reach of the statewide and metro ballots.

Strengthening support in this ballot

Because this is a public vote with no published cap, the dependable way to gain ground is mobilising real customers during the live window: ask in person, post the ballot link while the finals are running, and make the ask specific enough that a customer knows exactly which business to select. The organizer has published nothing about outside help, so the live ballot's terms are the only authority a campaign can check.

Support methods that work across ballots of this kind, and the limits on them, are set out on our votes guide. For readers weighing a paid route, the honest framing is on our award-votes page: winning cannot be promised by any service, and the organizer's unpublished rules are a risk nobody can price in advance.