Top Docs 2026 WINNERS: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Top Docs ballot is and who runs it

Top Docs is a best-of ballot focused on doctors, run by Aiken Standard, the daily newspaper published from Aiken, South Carolina. The program sits on the Second Street balloting platform, on the newspaper's own account at aikenstandard.secondstreetapp.com. The 2026 edition carries the name Top Docs 2026 WINNERS, and its promotion is registered as a Ballot/VotingBallot, the format Second Street uses for public-vote contests where readers pick winners in a list of categories.

The newspaper runs several public promotions on the same account. Alongside Top Docs there is Aiken's Choice, a broader readers' choice ballot that in 2026 ran a nomination-and-voting round from May 11 to July 8, and a series of sweepstakes promotions. Top Docs is the medical vertical of that family: where Aiken's Choice spreads across the whole local business scene, Top Docs narrows to physicians and practices.

For a practice wondering whether it belongs on this ballot, the practical facts are these. The organizer is a newspaper, so the audience is the paper's readership in and around Aiken. The host is a commercial balloting platform, so the voting interface, the submit flow and any anti-abuse checks are Second Street's, applied as the organizer configures them. And the edition a practice is most likely to be asked about is the results page, because the WINNERS suffix marks the ballot as the outcome of an already-decided contest.

The dated record for Top Docs editions

The confirmed edition years for Top Docs are 2021, 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026. That list comes from the promotion history on the Aiken Standard Second Street account, where each year's ballot sits at its own address. The confirmed list skips a year between 2021 and 2023, so the run is not unbroken, and treating it as continuous would be wrong.

The voting window across these editions has fallen between November and January. The platform dates for the program span from November 23, 2021 to January 23, 2026, which brackets the whole run. The 2026 WINNERS promotion itself carries a start and end date of January 23, 2026 and a status of closed, meaning the results-facing edition went live as a single dated entry rather than an open voting window.

What the published material for this ballot does not carry is a printed roster of the doctor categories, and no rules text covering a vote cap, one-vote-per-day limits or eligibility has been published for this promotion; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. That gap matters in practice. A practice planning its outreach cannot know from the published page whether the ballot asks for one answer per category or allows repeat voting, and the safest assumption is that whatever the live form enforces at submit time is the rule that counts.

For the next cycle, the pattern suggests a 2027 edition announced on the newspaper's own schedule. Nothing about its dates, its categories or its rules exists yet in published form, so any planning done before the ballot opens is planning against the previous year's shape.

How a supporter votes on the Top Docs ballot

The mechanic is a straightforward public vote. A supporter opens the ballot at the Top Docs address on the Aiken Standard account at Second Street, scrolls to the categories covering doctors and practices, selects a nominee in each category they want to answer, and submits. The ballot is the interface: whatever it asks for at submit time, an email address, a sign-in, a limit on repeats, is the rule in force for that edition.

Because the 2026 WINNERS promotion is closed, a supporter arriving today sees a results-facing page rather than an open form. The WINNERS suffix is how the account marks the decided edition of a contest, and the same pattern appears on Aiken's Choice 2026 WINNERS on the same account. To vote rather than read results, a supporter needs the open edition of the ballot, which appears on the account when the newspaper launches the next cycle.

Two practical points follow from the platform. First, the address matters: each edition lives at its own path, such as Top-Docs-2026 or Top-Docs-2025, so a link shared during the voting window should point at the current year's path, not an old one. Second, Second Street ballots are mobile-friendly, which matters for a newspaper audience where much of the voting happens from a phone after a reader hits the ballot through the paper's own promotion. A practice that wants support should hand people the direct link and a nudge about which category to answer, rather than directions that make each supporter hunt for the ballot.

Where Top Docs sits among South Carolina best-of ballots

Top Docs is unusual among the South Carolina best-of ballots in this directory because of how narrow its subject is. The state's remaining public-vote programs cover whole markets: the Best of South Carolina Awards, the BroadwayWorld South Carolina Awards, the Best of Charleston run by Charleston City Paper, Charleston Magazine's Best Of, and the two Best of Columbia ballots from Columbia Metropolitan and Free Times. Each of those spreads across many business categories. Top Docs takes the same readers'-choice format and points it at one professional field, doctors, in one newspaper's market.

That narrowness changes the competition. On a citywide best-of ballot a practice competes inside a medical slice of a large category list; on Top Docs the medical categories are the ballot, so the whole of a supporter's attention in a category lands on the field. It also means the audience is defined by the newspaper's reach in Aiken rather than by a metro-wide circulation.

The closest neighbour is not one of the state-level ballots but Aiken's Choice, the newspaper's own general readers' choice program on the same Second Street account. The two share an organizer, a platform and a market, and they differ in scope and season: Aiken's Choice ran its 2026 nomination-and-voting round from May 11 to July 8, while Top Docs voting falls in the November-to-January stretch. A practice with support in the Aiken community can reasonably appear on both, and the outreach built for one transfers to the other with little change.

Strengthening support while the ballot is open

Support in Top Docs comes from people who already know the practice, so the work is reminder work. When the next edition opens, share the ballot link directly, name the category you are asking about, and repeat the ask across the window rather than once at the start. Because the voting window falls in the November-to-January stretch, appointment reminders and year-end patient emails are a natural carrier for the link.

What the organizer says about outside help is enforced on the ballot itself: any restriction on automated voting or repeat submission is applied by the Second Street form at submit time, and the published material for this promotion carries no separate rules text. That makes the live ballot's own behaviour the only reliable statement of the rules. Outreach that asks real patients to vote, each on their own device, sits comfortably inside any public-vote format; bulk or automated submission is where ballots like this one typically draw the line.

For a fuller walkthrough of outreach that fits a public-vote ballot, see our guide to getting more votes online, and for the wider question of what purchased support can and cannot do in a contest like this, the award votes overview covers the ground without promising outcomes no organizer's rules would allow.