Best of Somerset County Community's Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes and what the Somerset County awards celebrate

The Best of Somerset County Community's Choice Awards is a community ballot: the people who live, work and shop in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, decide which local businesses and organizations earn the title. The ballot page puts it plainly, stating "Each year, the Best of Somerset County Community’s Choice Awards recognizes more than 330 businesses and organizations, and we couldn’t do it without community members like you!" That framing matters for anyone trying to understand the program. It is not a judges' panel or an editorial pick. The winners come from ordinary supporters clicking through a public ballot.

The program is run by the local Gannett / USA TODAY Network newspaper, which places it in the family of community choice contests that media publishers stage to connect readers with the businesses around them. The voting itself is hosted at yourchoiceawards.com/somerset/ on the Your Choice Awards system, the address supporters type or tap to reach the live ballot. The vertical is best-of, and the field is business: restaurants, shops, service providers and organizations across the county rather than people, athletes or schools.

Facts at a glance

Because the ballot is county-wide rather than tied to one town, a business anywhere in Somerset County can appear as a finalist, and a supporter anywhere in the county can vote for it. That breadth is what the more than 330 recognized businesses and organizations each year reflects.

The 2026 calendar and the editions on record

The 2026 cycle runs in three dated stages. The nomination round opened June 1 and closed June 22, 2026, and the page describes it as the stage where it all begins. Nominators during that window were entered into a drawing to win $250. After nominations closed, the top companies in every category advanced to the voting round, which runs August 7-21, 2026. Once voting ends, the page states that winners are announced October 10, 2026.

Two editions of the program are confirmed: 2025 and 2026, both carried on the Your Choice Awards platform at the same Somerset address. The program is annual, and 2027 is the expected next cycle. Each round so far has followed the same nomination-then-voting shape the 2026 dates show, which is useful for a business planning ahead: the nomination stage is where a finalist list gets set, and the August voting round is where the outcome is decided.

One thing the ballot page leaves open is who may take part and on what terms. It does not spell out nominator or business eligibility conditions; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. For a business owner, the practical reading of the confirmed calendar is simple. June is the month to make sure supporters nominate, August is the month to ask them to return daily, and early October is when results land.

How a supporter votes on the Somerset County ballot

The Somerset County ballot runs on a simple daily rhythm. The page states the rule directly: one vote, in each category, each day, for as long as the round runs. A supporter opens the ballot at yourchoiceawards.com/somerset/ during the August 7-21, 2026 window, picks a category, chooses the business or organization to support, and submits. Tomorrow, the same supporter can come back and vote again in the same category, and in every other category that matters to them.

The breadth of the ballot is what makes the daily rule significant. The page describes a long slate of categories spanning the county's businesses and organizations, and a supporter with strong local loyalties could spread their votes across many fields in one visit, then repeat the pattern each day through the window. For a nominated business, that means the most effective thing it can ask of customers is a habit, not a single click: a reminder to return daily while the round runs.

The page does not describe an account requirement for voting, and it does not print any eligibility screening for supporters. Those details, if they exist, live on the ballot itself rather than in any summary. What is printed is enough to plan around: one vote, per category, per day, inside a two-week August window, with the finalist list fixed by the June nomination round.

Where this ballot sits among Pennsylvania best-of programs

Pennsylvania has a crowded best-of field, and the Somerset County ballot is the county-scale, business-focused member of it. Its closest siblings on this site include Best of Berks (Berks County Living Magazine), another county-named ballot, and Best of Philly (Philadelphia Magazine), which plays the same game at big-city scale. The difference is reach and publisher: Somerset County is a single-county market run through a Gannett local paper, while the Philadelphia program belongs to a city magazine.

Other Pennsylvania neighbours fill out the picture. Best of the 'Burgh covers Pittsburgh, Best of the Lehigh Valley (Lehigh Valley Style) covers that metro, Bucks County & Chester County Readers' Choice runs through suburban newspapers, and Erie Reader Best of Erie comes from an alt-weekly. Each answers to its own publisher, its own platform and its own calendar, so a rule or date from one of them says nothing about Somerset County.

What distinguishes the Somerset ballot within this set is its host. The Your Choice Awards system is the Gannett-side voting platform, and the Somerset program sits on it alongside other Gannett-market community ballots. That gives the county program a consistent, dated structure year to year, which is exactly what a supporter or a nominated business needs when planning a daily voting routine around the August window.

Strengthening support during the Somerset County voting round

Because this ballot counts one vote per category per day, the support that wins is the kind that repeats. A Somerset County business that advanced past the June nomination round does best by turning its existing customers into daily visitors: a register-side sign, a receipt insert, a social post each morning of the August 7-21 window, each pointing to the specific category where the business is a finalist. The organizer's own structure rewards that steadiness, since every fresh day is a fresh ballot.

The organizer's printed rule is the boundary to respect. One vote per category per day is what the page allows, and pushing supporters to cast their legitimate daily votes is squarely inside it. What sits outside it is automated or bulk voting that pretends to be many separate supporters, which no publisher's rules tolerate and which this ballot's daily structure makes pointless anyway. Honest outreach across fourteen days beats any shortcut.

For a broader playbook, the guide at how to get more votes online walks through outreach that fits a community ballot: mobilizing staff, timing reminders to the daily reset, and making the category link easy to find. The single most useful asset a Somerset County finalist can build is a short link to its category page, shared wherever its customers already look.