Bestofmpissue: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Bestofmpissue ballot is and who runs it

Bestofmpissue is the page Mount Pleasant Magazine uses for its Best of Mount Pleasant program, a readers' choice ballot in the best-of vertical. The organizer is a South Carolina town magazine: Mount Pleasant Magazine is published six times per year by Media Services, Inc. from Chuck Dawley Blvd in Mount Pleasant, and it is listed among the associate members of the state press association. Unlike the statewide Best of South Carolina Awards or the citywide Best of Charleston, this program answers to one town's readership, and the businesses on the ballot are the ones Mount Pleasant readers nominate themselves.

The ballot lives on the magazine's own domain rather than with a contest vendor. The voting address is mountpleasantmagazine.com/bestofmpissue/, and the magazine also maintains a separate bestofballot page where supporters nominate favorites before voting opens. That two-page setup, nomination on one page and voting on another, is the program's own structure, and it is why the voting URL above points at the magazine's domain instead of a contest vendor.

Facts at a glance

Because the organizer is the publisher itself, everything a supporter needs lives on the magazine's domain, and the magazine's own departments, from Around Town to its Real Estate coverage, sit alongside the ballot on the same site.

The dated record for this Mount Pleasant ballot

Two editions of the Bestofmpissue ballot are confirmed: 2025 and 2026. The magazine's own masthead for the 2026 January/February issue carries the line ANNUAL BEST OF EDITION, and its web extras trace the voting season back to 2016, when the magazine announced that the Best of Mount Pleasant for 2016 voting season was upon us. So the program is annual with a history reaching back to 2016, while the ballot page itself carries confirmed editions for 2025 and 2026.

The voting window is the one dated fact the magazine prints in its own words: August 1 through October 10. That phrase appears on the magazine's pages, and the magazine used it when telling readers that its Best of Mount Pleasant voting began August 1 and ends October 10. The window spans the late summer into early fall, which is when the magazine's annual Best of edition lands with readers.

The nomination round's own calendar is missing from the voting page. The magazine confirms elsewhere that a nomination phase exists, directing readers to nominate favorite local businesses and activities at its bestofballot page, but the dates that round opens and closes are not printed beside the ballot; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The page also carries no category count, so the size of the ballot is something a supporter reads off the live form rather than from any summary.

How a supporter votes on the Best of Mount Pleasant ballot

The mechanic has two steps, and the magazine's own pages describe both. First, nomination: the magazine tells readers to visit MountPleasantMagazine.com/bestofballot to nominate favorite local businesses and activities. That form is where a Mount Pleasant business gets onto the ballot in the first place, and it is open before the voting window begins.

Second, the vote itself. During the printed window of August 1 through October 10, supporters go to the Bestofmpissue page on the magazine's site and fill in the Best of Mount Pleasant ballot. The magazine's rule is printed in one line on its ballot page: each voter may vote only once. There is no daily return in this program, no coming back tomorrow to vote again, so a supporter's entire contribution is one completed ballot.

That one-vote rule shapes everything about how the ballot is won. A business cannot accumulate votes from the same loyal customer returning day after day; it has to reach different people across Mount Pleasant during the roughly ten weeks the window is open. The ballot sits on the magazine's domain, so no third-party account is involved in the vote itself, and the categories a voter fills in are whatever the live form carries that cycle, since the magazine does not publish a category count on the page.

How this ballot sits beside its South Carolina neighbours

Best-of programs are thick on the ground across South Carolina, and Bestofmpissue is the most local of the ones covered here. The Best of South Carolina Awards runs at the state level, while the Best of Charleston and Charleston Magazine's Best Of cover the city next door with their own publishers and their own ballots. Columbia has two separate readers' choice programs, the Best of Columbia from Columbia Metropolitan and the Best of Columbia from Free Times, and the BroadwayWorld South Carolina Awards covers theatre statewide.

Scale and host are what set the Mount Pleasant ballot apart from every one of those programs. It belongs to a single town magazine that publishes six times per year, it runs on the magazine's domain instead of a contest platform, and its audience is the magazine's own Lowcountry readership. A business in Mount Pleasant could in principle appear on both this ballot and a Charleston program, but the votes do not transfer: every program here answers to a different publisher, with its own window and its own rules.

For a supporter, that means the practical advice is program-specific. The August 1 through October 10 window and the one-vote rule belong to this magazine's ballot, not to the statewide or Charleston programs, and a strategy borrowed from a bigger contest does not fit a one-town, one-vote format.

Strengthening support within this ballot's rules

This ballot's format leaves little room for cleverness and a lot of room for outreach. Because the magazine states that each voter may vote only once, the only way to add votes is to add voters: customers, neighbours and clients in Mount Pleasant who will fill in the ballot once during the August 1 to October 10 window. A business that starts asking in the first weeks of the window has the full ten weeks to collect single ballots from different people, while one that waits until October is compressing the same work into days.

On the subject of outside help, the magazine has published no statement for this program, so the printed one-vote rule is the only constraint a supporter can read in advance. Staying inside it is straightforward: every vote should come from a different person completing their own single ballot. Our guide to getting more votes online walks through outreach that fits a one-vote-per-person local ballot like this one, and the award votes page explains how support for award ballots is generally organized.