2026 Best of Your Hometown Community's Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

A community ballot run by Anderson's hometown newspaper

The Best of Your Hometown Community's Choice Awards is a public-vote program run by Anderson Independent Mail, the local newspaper serving Anderson, South Carolina. It belongs to the best-of tradition of journalism: the publisher opens a ballot, local readers nominate and then vote for the businesses and favorites they believe deserve recognition, and the results are published as a winners list at the end of the cycle.

Second Street hosts the ballot, the platform that powers many newspaper-run contests, under the publisher's own contests domain at independentmail.gannettcontests.com. The 2026 edition was listed as a Ballot/VotingBallot promotion, which is the format Second Street uses for straightforward public voting on a list of options.

What makes this program distinctive is its framing. Rather than anchoring itself to the newspaper's name, it presents itself as the community's own award: "Your Hometown" is the reader's hometown, and the "Community's Choice" label puts the decision entirely in the hands of the people who live and shop there. For a local business, a placing on this ballot is a piece of third-party recognition from the town's own newspaper, which is why owners and their regulars take the voting window seriously.

The dated record for this program

The program has confirmed editions in 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026, four consecutive cycles that establish it as an annual fixture on the Anderson Independent Mail calendar. Each edition has left its own set of pages on the contests domain: a main ballot page, a nomination page and a winners page, so the 2026 cycle alone has three published addresses covering the full life of the promotion.

The 2026 ballot ran from June 8 to June 23, 2026, a window of a little over two weeks, and is now closed. The wider platform span for the program reaches back to December 5, 2023, which is when the earliest activity in the current run of editions begins. The next cycle is expected in 2027, based on the program running every year since 2023.

Not everything a supporter might want is published up front. The organizer has not released a category list on the listing for the 2026 edition, and no rules text covering a vote cap, return-visit limits or eligibility is carried alongside the ballot details; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. That gap is common for newspaper best-of programs, where the fine print tends to live on the ballot form itself rather than in the promotion summary, but it does mean a business planning its campaign should read the live page during the window rather than relying on the listing alone.

How a supporter votes on this ballot

Voting here is the plain public-vote mechanic that Second Street ballots are built around. A supporter visits the ballot page on the publisher's contests domain during the open window, moves through the categories shown on the form, and selects the local favorite they want to back in each one. There is no entry fee and no purchase involved in casting a vote; the ballot exists to measure community preference, so the barrier to participating is deliberately low.

The 2026 cycle also carried a separate nomination page, marked NOMS in its address, which indicates that the program separates the act of putting a business on the ballot from the act of voting for it once it is there. A supporter who wants a favorite recognized may therefore need to act in both phases: nominate during the nomination period, then return to vote once the ballot opens.

Because the 2026 window closed on June 23, a visitor today sees the finished promotion rather than a live form. The practical sequence for the next cycle is the same one this program has used across its confirmed editions: find the current ballot on independentmail.gannettcontests.com, read the instructions printed on the form, make selections in the categories that matter to you, submit before the closing date, and return as often as the printed rules allow. The rules printed on the live form are the authoritative version for that cycle.

Where this ballot sits among South Carolina's best-of programs

South Carolina has an unusually rich set of community-vote awards, and this program occupies a specific niche within them. It is the hometown-scale ballot for the Anderson market, run by the town's own newspaper, while other programs in the state answer to different publishers and different geographies. The Best of South Carolina Awards spans the whole state under its own publisher, and the Best of Charleston and Charleston Magazine's Best Of serve the Lowcountry from two separate newsrooms.

Columbia has its own pair of programs, the Best of Columbia run by Columbia Metropolitan and a second Best of Columbia run by Free Times, each answering to its own publisher. The BroadwayWorld South Carolina Awards rounds out the set with a theater-focused ballot for the whole state.

Against those neighbours, the Anderson ballot differs in scale and in voice. It is not a statewide or city-capital program; it is a single-market ballot whose identity is tied to the phrase "Your Hometown," and its results carry weight precisely because the voters are the newspaper's own local readership. A business deciding where to concentrate its supporters' energy should treat this as the Anderson market's own award, distinct from the statewide and Charleston and Columbia ballots, and plan around the June window this program has used for its recent editions.

Strengthening support in a hometown ballot

Support in this program comes from the Anderson community itself, so the work of gathering votes is mostly local outreach. During the open window, a business can ask customers in person, post the ballot link on its own social channels, and ask staff to share it with their networks. Because the ballot is run by the town's newspaper, a nomination or vote here reads as a hometown endorsement, which is a message that lands well with regulars.

Timing matters: the 2026 window ran from June 8 to June 23, so a push concentrated in the first week reaches supporters before the closing-date rush. What the organizer says about outside help is printed on the live ballot, and reading those terms before any organized push is the sensible first step. For a broader playbook that applies to community ballots like this one, see how to get more votes online.