Best of Springfield: How Voting Works & How to Win

What Best of Springfield is and who runs it

Best of Springfield is a readers' choice ballot for the Springfield, Ohio community, run by the Springfield News-Sun, the daily newspaper whose newsroom covers the city and the surrounding Clark County. This ballot is part of the best-of family: rather than crowning a single winner, it lets the public nominate and then vote for favorites across a wide spread of local business and interest categories.

The vote is hosted directly by the publisher, with no outside contest platform involved. The address a supporter needs is https://www.springfieldnewssun.com/local/bestofspringfield/, and because the newspaper runs the ballot itself, the rules, the category list and the round dates all come from the same organization that reports the city's news. The ballot page doubles as the program's home on the site, sitting under the paper's local section.

For a local business, appearing on this ballot means being measured against neighbours in the same market, with the newspaper's audience as the voting pool. That audience is local by design: the metro the program serves is Springfield and Clark County, so a nomination carries weight with the exact customers a downtown shop or a family restaurant depends on. The table underneath gathers the program's fixed details.

The dated record for Best of Springfield

The program's confirmed run spans 2024, 2025 and 2026, and it runs on an annual cycle with the next edition expected in 2027. The most recent cycle has already completed its vote: the publisher's own page states that Best of Springfield 2026 voting is closed and outlines what comes next for the program.

Within a cycle the shape is two-step. The public nominates favorites from June 16 to June 27, in a round the organizer describes as covering a wide range of categories across a variety of business and interests. Finalists are then vetted and chosen, and the voting round runs from July 21 through August 8. Those dates come from the organizer's own published materials for the program.

The ballot page leaves out the eligibility fine print for nominees, and no prize or feature attached to finishing first is described there; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. That holds equally for the precise start and finish days of future cycles, which the organizer announces on the ballot page when a new edition approaches. Until that announcement, the confirmed facts are the three edition years, the June nomination window, the July and August voting window, and the closed status of the 2026 round.

How a supporter votes in Best of Springfield today

The mechanic on this ballot is deliberately simple, and it rewards repetition. A supporter visits the Best of Springfield page on springfieldnewssun.com, finds the nominee they want to back in the category list, and casts a vote. The published instruction for the program is one vote per day, so the ballot is built around daily returns rather than a single visit.

That daily rule changes how support works in practice. A nominee whose backers vote once contributes a single count; a nominee whose backers set a reminder and return every day of the voting round compounds their support across the whole window. For a Springfield business, the practical move is to tell customers the ballot is open, name the category, and ask them to come back each day while voting runs.

Because the newspaper hosts the vote itself, there is no separate contest account to create and no third-party platform to learn. The supporter goes to the publisher's page, votes, and leaves. When the 2026 round closed, the same page became the place where the next cycle's dates will appear, so the habit of checking springfieldnewssun.com directly is what keeps a supporter current. Anyone studying the mechanics of public ballots more broadly can compare this one with Best of Ohio, which runs at statewide scale under a different organizer.

How this ballot sits beside its Ohio neighbours

Public-vote programs are plentiful across Ohio, and Best of Springfield occupies a specific niche in the field: a city-level readers' choice ballot run by the local daily newspaper, serving Springfield and Clark County. Its closest structural cousins are the other community ballots on this site. Best of Cincinnati is the alt-weekly version of the same idea in a much larger market, while Akron Community's Choice Awards runs the community-choice format for that city. CBUS Top Picks Community Choice Awards does the same for Columbus.

Two neighbours differ in scope. Best in Ohio Business Awards and Best of Ohio both speak to all of Ohio instead of one city, so a Springfield business nominated locally competes against a different, smaller and more concentrated voting pool than it would on a statewide ballot. 97.1 The Fan Pizza Madness Columbus shows the other end of the format: a radio station running a single-category bracket.

What distinguishes the Springfield program is the nomination round before voting and the newspaper as both host and promoter, which keeps the audience local by default.

Strengthening support within this ballot's rules

This program's mechanic points to one clear strategy: the daily return. With a published one-vote-per-day instruction and a voting round that spans July 21 to August 8, the nominees that finish strongest are the ones whose supporters show up repeatedly, not once. A Springfield business can build that habit cheaply, with a counter sign, a line on receipts, or a recurring social post naming the category and the daily ask.

The organizer's published instruction is the boundary a supporter works inside. Anything that inflates the count beyond genuine daily participation sits outside the rule the Springfield News-Sun has printed, and the organizer's rules govern what happens to votes cast in its contest. That is why the honest playbook here is mobilizing real customers: staff, regulars and neighbours who can each return daily for the length of the round.

For a fuller treatment of legitimate growth tactics on public-vote ballots, see our guide to getting more votes online, and for the broader question of what purchased support does and does not mean on a ballot like this one, see the award-votes overview.