2025 Best of the Best Southwest Nominations: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Best of the Best Southwest ballot is and who runs it

Best of the Best is the readers'-choice awards program of the Tribune-Review, the Pennsylvania newspaper publisher whose TribLIVE masthead carries the awards site. Each year the paper splits the program into regional ballots, and the Southwest ballot covers the Allegheny South-West portion of the program's market, alongside separate Allegheny North, Allegheny East, Allegheny West and Westmoreland regions printed on the organizer's own navigation.

Second Street, the contest platform behind the tribweb.secondstreetapp.com domain, hosts every Best of the Best ballot the paper runs. A supporter reaches the program through a ballot page such as the 2025 Southwest nominations ballot, and the organizer's promotions on that host also include unrelated sweepstakes and polls, which is why typing the specific ballot address matters.

The program's own about page describes TribLIVE's Best of the Best Community Choice Awards as an annual people's choice event honoring businesses, events and organizations across Southwestern Pennsylvania. That makes this a business best-of ballot rather than a people or student vote: the nominees are local shops, restaurants, service providers and organizations, and the voters are the paper's readers.

The dated record: 2023, 2024 and 2025 editions

Confirmed editions of the Best of the Best Southwest program ran in 2023, 2024 and 2025, each with its own pair of ballot pages on the Second Street host: a nominations page and a voting page. The 2023 and 2024 cycle pages, including a Best of the Best SOUTHWEST winners page for 2023 and a WINNERS page for 2024, remain on the platform, which is how the three-year run is traced.

The 2025 cycle is the one this page covers. Its nominations ballot ran from July 20 through August 3, 2025, per the organizer's own about page, and the voting round on the top five nominees ran September 21 through October 5, 2025. Awardees for that cycle were announced on December 11, 2025, online and in a special edition of the paper's print publications.

The organizer's FAQ also prints the 2026 dates: nominations July 2 through August 2, 2026, and voting September 3 through October 4, 2026. Those pages describe the wider program's full category roster, though the categories that apply to any single region are only fully visible on its own ballot. Whether the Southwest cycle carries any per-supporter limit beyond the daily voting rule, or an eligibility statement for who may cast ballots, is not spelled out anywhere in the organizer's published material; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How a supporter votes on the Southwest ballot today

Voting happens in two phases, both on pages Second Street serves under the tribweb.secondstreetapp.com domain. During the nomination phase, a reader opens the Southwest nominations page and writes in a favorite business or organization under each category they care about. No shortlist exists yet at this stage; the point of the summer round is to build one.

Once nominations close, the organizer tallies the write-ins and the top five nominees in each category advance. The paper's FAQ states the format plainly: voting on the top five nominees is open to the public and based on one vote per person per day. That daily allowance is the load-bearing mechanic of the whole program, because it rewards nominees whose supporters come back repeatedly rather than voting once and drifting away.

Practically, a supporter bookmarking the ballot page and returning each day of the voting window gives a nominee the maximum legitimate support a single person can offer. Businesses that understand this shape their campaigns around reminders: a counter sign, a weekly social post, an email to the customer list with the direct ballot link. When the round closes, results move to the announcement phase, where the Tribune-Review publishes winners online and in print. A reader who misses the fall window simply waits for the next cycle's nomination round.

How the Southwest ballot sits beside its Pennsylvania neighbours

Pennsylvania is unusually crowded with readers'-choice ballots, and the Tribune-Review's program differs from all of them in one structural way: it is split by region rather than run as one statewide or one citywide list. Allegheny South-West, Allegheny North, Allegheny East, Allegheny West and Westmoreland each get their own voting ballot in the fall, on separate dates from the sibling regions, so a business competes only against neighbours in its own part of the market.

That regional split also separates this program from the state's other publications. Best of the 'Burgh answers to a different publisher, as do Best of Philly (Philadelphia Magazine) in the east, Best of the Lehigh Valley (Lehigh Valley Style), Best of Berks (Berks County Living Magazine), the Bucks County & Chester County Readers' Choice and the Erie Reader Best of Erie. A vote cast on one of those pages carries no weight toward the Tribune-Review's Southwest ballot and vice versa.

For a nominee, the practical takeaway is to confirm which ballot its customers are actually on before campaigning. A business in the Southwest region competing on the wrong regional page, or on another paper's program, gathers support that cannot help it here.

Strengthening support for a Southwest nominee

Because each supporter may return daily, the strongest legitimate campaign for a Southwest nominee is a daily habit among real customers. A shop that asks every visitor in September, prints the ballot link on receipts, and posts a reminder each morning converts its existing base into a repeating vote stream, which is exactly what the format rewards.

The organizer's published material does not address outside vote support either way, so any paid option should be weighed against the paper's terms before committing. Background reading on the options sits at buy award votes, and the practical limits are the same as any daily-capped public vote: support that arrives as a burst rather than a steady daily rhythm looks different from the behavior the one-vote-per-day format assumes.

Whatever route a business takes, the anchor is the same ballot page. Support only counts while the regional voting round is open, and the Southwest page sits at a separate URL from the Allegheny North, East, West and Westmoreland pages under the paper's own account, so every reminder should link the correct region.