Aiken's Choice 2026 WINNERS: How Voting Works & How to Win

A hometown ballot in a state full of bigger readers' choice votes

Most South Carolina readers' choice programs on this site cover a whole state or a major city. Best-of ballots from Charleston, Columbia and statewide titles reach large metro audiences. Aiken's Choice is the opposite shape: a single-newspaper, single-town ballot built around one community and its daily paper.

The organizer is Aiken Standard, a daily newspaper published from Aiken, South Carolina. The program is Aiken's Choice, a best-of, public-vote contest in the business vertical. Every confirmed edition has run on the Second Street platform under the newspaper's own secondstreetapp.com address, with the ballot for each year living at its own path. The current representative address is the WINNERS ballot at aikenstandard.secondstreetapp.com/Aikens-Choice-2026-WINNERS.

Facts at a glance

The contrast with its siblings matters for a supporter. A statewide ballot spreads attention across many markets; a hometown ballot like this one concentrates it, which is why the program has kept the same organizer, the same platform and the same naming pattern across every confirmed year from 2019 through 2026.

The dated record of Aiken's Choice from 2019 to 2026

The program is annual, and its confirmed edition years run from 2019 through 2026. Each year has its own ballot address on the Second Street host: a 2019 edition, a 2020 edition, a 2021 edition, a 2022 edition, a 2023 edition, a 2024 edition, a 2025 edition and the 2026 edition, ending in the WINNERS ballot that now represents the program.

The earliest confirmed edition carried an opening date of April 1, 2019. In the 2026 cycle the structure had two parts. Aiken's Choice 2026 itself was a combined nomination and voting ballot that ran from May 11 through July 8, 2026. After that closed, Aiken Standard published a separate results ballot, Aiken's Choice 2026 WINNERS, which went live on July 16, 2026 and closed the same day. Both promotions are listed by the Second Street application programming interface as Ballot-type promotions under the Aiken Standard organization.

What the program's own pages do not print is a standing set of dates for the next cycle, and the newspaper has not published the category roster or the vote rules in any standing form; a supporter planning an early start should confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The next expected edition is 2027. Earlier cycles are consistent with the spring-into-summer window the 2026 round followed, but Aiken Standard announces each cycle's open and close dates at launch.

How a supporter votes on the Aiken's Choice ballot

The literal mechanic is a Second Street public ballot. In the 2026 main round, a supporter visited the Aiken's Choice address under aikenstandard.secondstreetapp.com, worked through a combined nomination and voting ballot, picked favorites in the categories shown, and submitted the form. The ballot type for both the main round and the WINNERS round is Ballot/VotingBallot in Second Street's own classification, which is the standard format for a readers' choice vote.

Three details of the mechanic are decided per cycle and are printed on the live ballot: which categories are offered, whether the round accepts write-in nominees, and what the vote frequency rule is for each supporter. Aiken Standard has not published a cap, an eligibility rule set or a login requirement in any standing form, so the live form and its rule text are the authority for the round a supporter is in.

Because the 2026 WINNERS ballot is closed, there is no live voting action available at the representative address right now. Anyone hoping to take part in the next round should watch Aiken Standard, which also runs sweepstakes and photo voting promotions on the same host, and follow the ballot address the newspaper points to when the 2027 edition opens. Once the round is live, the sequence is the one above: open the address, read the printed categories and rules, select favorites, and submit. Anyone weighing outside help for a business they support can read the award votes reference for general background before deciding anything.

Where Aiken's Choice sits among South Carolina ballots

Within this site's South Carolina coverage, Aiken's Choice shares the best-of vertical with five siblings: the Best of South Carolina Awards, the BroadwayWorld South Carolina Awards, Best of Charleston from the Charleston City Paper, Charleston Magazine's Best Of, and two Columbia ballots, from Columbia Metropolitan and from Free Times. Each of those answers to a different publisher and a different audience.

What separates Aiken's Choice from all of them is scale of place and continuity of host. It is the only one anchored to Aiken, it is run by a daily newspaper rather than a magazine or a specialist publisher, and it has kept every edition on one platform under one organization account since 2019. The siblings cover Charleston, Columbia or the state as a whole, so a business listed in Aiken's Choice is not competing with any of them and a vote cast on one ballot carries no weight on another.

For a supporter, the practical difference is awareness. A statewide ballot relies on broad media reach; a hometown ballot relies on the newspaper's own readership, which is why Aiken Standard promotes the round alongside its sweepstakes and photo contests on the same Second Street host. For a business considering how to approach the next round, our award votes page and the votes guide describe the options in general terms, and the newspaper's own ballot rules always govern what is allowed in this specific program.