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

A hometown ballot built around the businesses Anderson already uses

"Your Hometown" is the operative phrase in this ballot's own title, and the Anderson Independent Mail built the format around exactly that idea: Anderson, South Carolina residents naming the businesses that already earn their return visits, not an outside panel scoring entries. Four editions have run this way so far, 2023 through 2026, each one tallied on independentmail.gannettcontests.com.

Anderson sits in South Carolina's Upstate region along the I-85 corridor, serving as the seat of Anderson County. The Independent Mail's own coverage reaches past the city itself into the county's smaller towns, the same reach this ballot draws its support from.

That absence holds steady across all four editions so far. Neither the category list nor a voting ceiling is printed there; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

A June window that has already closed

As of September 2026, the 2026 Best of Your Hometown ballot is closed. Its window opened June 8 and ran through June 23. Four straight confirmed editions, 2023 through 2026, point toward an annual pattern, though the Independent Mail has not posted an exact 2027 date.

A resident or business checking in today finds a closed page, not an open one. independentmail.gannettcontests.com stays the only source for the next opening once the Independent Mail sets it; the window has moved month to month before.

South Carolina runs several other hometown-style ballots entirely apart from Anderson's own, and landing on the wrong one is an easy slip for anyone searching casually.

Not Charleston's ballot, not Columbia's, and not the statewide one either

South Carolina's best-of landscape spreads across several cities, each with its own separate publisher counting its own separate votes. Anderson's own ballot belongs only to the Independent Mail.

Charleston and Columbia both sit well away from Anderson, toward South Carolina's coast and midlands, run by publishers with no tie to the Independent Mail's own tally. BroadwayWorld's South Carolina Awards scores theater productions, a different vertical entirely from a hometown business ballot. Best of South Carolina Awards folds in businesses statewide under a masthead of its own, so a strong showing there says nothing about Anderson's own results, and the reverse holds true as well.

A quick way to spot the right page

A general search for "best of Anderson SC" or "hometown choice awards" can surface any of the six programs above alongside the Independent Mail's own listing. independentmail.gannettcontests.com is the address tied to this exact ballot, and none of the other six mastheads publish results for it.

Turning out real support before the next window opens

Four confirmed editions give Anderson more of a pattern to work from than a first-year ballot offers, though the exact month has already shifted across past cycles and could shift again. Treating independentmail.gannettcontests.com as the source to check, instead of working from a prior year's calendar, is the safer habit.

Gannett's Second Street platform applies the same screening for irregular activity across every market it runs, Anderson included. A supporter base built from people who genuinely patronize the business, reached more than once across the window, tends to hold up better under that kind of review than any shortcut.

A nomination and a win settle two different questions, and only the Independent Mail decides the second. is buying votes legal lays out the boundary between a legitimate campaign and a riskier one, worth reading before a business commits real time to Anderson's next window. Buying votes online describes what paid outside help typically involves for a hometown-style ballot like this one, and award-vote campaign planning walks through tactics suited to precisely this kind of readers'-choice format.

None of that changes the underlying math: a ballot naming itself after "Your Hometown" still runs on the same Second Street rails as every other Gannett paper's own poll, with the same close attention paid to where the traffic actually comes from.