Living Magazine Readers' Choice: How Voting Works & How to Win

What Living Magazine Readers' Choice is and who runs it

Most best-of ballots in South Dakota answer to a newspaper or to a shared voting platform. This one answers to a single publisher. Living Magazine Readers' Choice is run by Living Magazine, which keeps the entire program on its own website at livingmagazine.net rather than handing the vote to a third-party service. The magazine's copyright line, printed at the foot of the site, reaches back to 1998, so the publication predates the readers' choice program by decades.

The publisher's own description of the program is short enough to quote in full: "Each year, online voting is conducted throughout all of the Living Magazine communities to determine which businesses YOU think are The Best!" Two things in that sentence set the shape of the ballot. It is a business award, not a people or a place award, and it is decided by readers rather than by editors or a judging panel.

Hosting matters more here than it does on most programs. Because the vote lives on the publisher's own domain, the address for each cycle changes with the year, and the current page is https://livingmagazine.net/2026-best-of-readers-choice-winners. There is no standing voting platform to return to, and no external account system connected to the ballot.

The dated timeline for this ballot

Four edition years are on file for this program: 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026. That run qualifies it as an annual program on its own, and the publisher's recurring language, that voting is conducted each year, lines up with the same run. The 2026 cycle is presented on a winners page, meaning the current address announces results rather than carrying an open vote. A 2027 edition would be the next step in the pattern.

The season sits inside a fixed stretch of the calendar. The confirmed cycle runs from March through May, and the current page carries the results phase of that window. What the results page does not print is the exact day voting opens or the day it closes, and it does not describe any nomination round that might precede the vote; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Two more gaps sit alongside the dates. The page publishes no per-supporter limit, no eligibility text and no description of how many rounds a vote goes through before winners are named. The category list is also absent from the results announcement, so the business groupings a supporter sees during the vote are only visible once a live ballot is open. None of these gaps is unusual for a publisher-hosted program, but they mean the winners page on its own cannot tell a supporter what the voting experience will look like next spring.

How a supporter votes today

The mechanic depends entirely on where in the annual cycle the ballot sits. Right now the live address presents the 2026 Best Of Readers' Choice Winners, so a visitor arriving today reads results. During the voting window, from March through May, the same domain carries the ballot instead, and the publisher describes that ballot as an online vote conducted across all of the Living Magazine communities.

The community structure is the part a supporter should understand before voting. Living Magazine organizes its coverage into regional editions, and the vote asks readers to choose businesses within those communities. That means the first practical step is finding the edition that covers the businesses a supporter wants to recognize, rather than searching a single statewide list. The results page does include a search field, which the site labels with a prompt to type in your search and press enter, useful for checking whether a specific business appears among past winners.

What the results page cannot show is the form itself. Whether a vote requires an email address, whether a supporter may return each day, and how the categories are laid out are all questions the winners announcement leaves unanswered. The literal sequence a supporter follows, in order, is to open the publisher's site, find the current voting page from the results page or the regional editions navigation, pick the community and category, and submit. Once the window closes, the page reverts to results, exactly as it has for the 2026 cycle.

How this ballot sits beside its South Dakota neighbours

South Dakota carries six sibling best-of programs, and the fastest way to explain this one is by what it does not share with them. CommunityVotes Rapid City and CommunityVotes Sioux Falls both run on a shared nomination-then-vote platform with a structure that repeats across every market using that service. Rapid City Journal Readers' Choice and Rapid City Journal Best of the Black Hills answer to a daily newspaper with strong city and regional anchors. 605 Magazine Best of South Dakota is the closest cousin, since it is also a magazine-run program, and Best of Mitchell ties its ballot to a single town.

This program differs in three ways. First, hosting: the vote sits on livingmagazine.net itself, so there is no external ballot interface. Second, geography: the publisher frames the vote around its own communities rather than around a city limit or a named region, which makes the ballot's footprint a matter of the magazine's coverage map. Third, anchoring: while several siblings are tied to one city, this program addresses readers across all of the publisher's communities at once. For a business deciding where to concentrate a spring push, the March through May window places this ballot in the same season as most South Dakota readers' choice rounds, which is worth weighing against the publisher-hosted format.