Columbus Dispatchs Top Picks: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Top Picks ballot is and who runs it

The problem a nominated business faces is simple: customers say they will vote, but nobody is sure where the ballot actually lives. Columbus Dispatchs Top Picks is the readers-choice program of The Columbus Dispatch, the daily newspaper of Columbus, Ohio. The paper hosts the ballot on Second Street, the contest platform behind many US newspaper readers-choice programs, under its own dispatch.secondstreetapp.com address. The vertical is best-of: the ballot exists so readers can honor their favorite local businesses across a wide spread of everyday categories.

Because the program belongs to the paper rather than to an outside promoter, the Dispatch controls the nomination round, the voting round and the published results. In the 2017 cycle the paper thanked voters for taking part in the CBUS Top Picks and pointed them to a Winners Guide printed in the Dispatch on Friday, December 22. That printed guide is the concrete payoff for a nominated business: winning or placing means appearing in the paper itself, not just on a webpage.

The facts below are the fixed points a business can rely on when it asks supporters to vote.

The dated history of Top Picks editions

A business that missed last year's ballot usually wants to know whether the program is still alive before it invests a month of customer asks. The confirmed edition years for Top Picks are 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2024 and 2025, and the program started in 2016. The gap between 2020 and 2024 is part of the confirmed years, so the program's history is annual in shape but not unbroken.

The calendar has a recognizable shape. A nomination round ran August 1 through August 31, 2019, under the paper's "be a CBUS Top Pick" promotion, so August has been the nomination month in at least that cycle. The results season is anchored to December: the 2017 Winners Guide appeared in the Dispatch on Friday, December 22. What the organizer has not printed on the archived ballot page is the voting window for the current cycle, so the open and close dates confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Two further gaps matter to a nominee. The category list for the edition now running is not published on the archived page, even though the ballot has carried a wide spread of categories in the past, including Pets, In and Around the House, and Kids and Education. The Dispatch has also not published its rules text on eligibility or outside help anywhere a nominee could read it in advance, which is a real gap for any business weighing a promotional push.

How a supporter votes on the live ballot

The mechanic is the part a business can explain to a customer in a single sentence, and it is worth getting right because a confused supporter usually abandons the ballot. Voting happens on the Second Street page the Dispatch publishes for the current edition. The supporter reaches the ballot, finds the category where the business is nominated, selects it and submits the form.

The repeat rule is what shapes a campaign: a supporter can vote once per category per day while the voting round is active. That means one customer is not one vote but a daily vote, and a business that reminds its regulars each morning multiplies its support without reaching anyone new. It also means the ballot rewards businesses with a genuine daily habit among customers, such as a coffee shop or a lunch spot, more than one with occasional visitors.

Practical advice follows directly from the mechanic. Ask supporters to bookmark the live ballot address rather than an old edition link, because the Second Street address carries the edition year and an old link leads to a closed ballot. Ask them to confirm the business name spelling before submitting, since a vote on a near-match entry helps a competitor. And set the expectation that voting is a daily action for the length of the round, not a single favor, because that is what the once-per-category-per-day rule actually asks of them.

How Top Picks sits beside other Ohio ballots

Ohio runs several public-vote programs a Columbus business might be asked to join, and they answer to different publishers. The closest neighbour in this market is the CBUS Top Picks Community Choice Awards, which shares the CBUS Top Picks name and the Dispatch's home turf. A business should treat the two as separate ballots with separate support, because support given to one program does nothing for the other.

Statewide, Best of Ohio and the Best in Ohio Business Awards both run best-of ballots at a broader scale, and the Akron Community's Choice Awards serves the Akron market in the same vertical. In Cincinnati, Best of Cincinnati is the alt-weekly equivalent of what the Dispatch runs in Columbus. Sports radio adds 97.1 The Fan Pizza Madness Columbus, a themed bracket rather than a business best-of.

What makes Top Picks different is its publisher and its printed outcome. The Columbus Dispatch is the market's daily paper, and the December Winners Guide puts results in front of the whole readership, which is why a placement here is worth a focused push even beside the other Ohio ballots a business could enter.

Strengthening support in this ballot

A business nominated to Top Picks works with a daily-return mechanic, so the strongest campaigns are built on repetition rather than one big ask. Put the live ballot link where regulars already look, such as a receipt, a counter sign or an email list, and remind supporters that the once-per-category-per-day rule means yesterday's vote does not carry over. Staff who know customers by name are the most reliable askers a small business has.

The organizer's position on outside help is a gap: The Columbus Dispatch has not published rules text on eligibility or promotional assistance on the archived ballot page, so a business cannot read the enforcement line in advance. That uncertainty is itself the risk, and it argues for support that comes from real customers who can repeat the vote daily on their own. For a wider view of the tactics that fit public ballots like this one, see award-vote support and judge what fits this ballot's rules before committing.