Best in Town 2026 (tylermorningtelegraph): How Voting Works & How to Win

What Best in Town is and who runs it

Best in Town is the readers' choice program the Tyler Morning Telegraph runs for its home market in Tyler, Texas. The newspaper, whose own site sits at tylerpaper.com, lists the contest in the best-of vertical: readers nominate and then vote for local businesses across a set of categories the ballot displays each year. The program name carries the market with it, so a reader searching for Best in Town in Texas is looking for this Tyler ballot and not a metro title.

The ballot itself is hosted on Second Street, the contest platform whose app domain is secondstreetapp.com, and the 2026 edition of Best in Town lives at tylermorningtelegraph.secondstreetapp.com/Best-in-Town-2026-2. In the platform's listing the promotion is typed as a Ballot/NominationAndVotingBallot, the format that lets a supporter both put a business forward and cast votes for named nominees. The 2026 window ran from May 26 to July 27, 2026, and the listing now shows that ballot as closed.

Everything a supporter needs to enter the live ballot sits on that single address; the newspaper's coverage and promotion run on tylerpaper.com. The fixed facts about the program, from organizer to window, sit together in the table below.

The dated record for Best in Town

Eight straight annual editions of Best in Town are confirmed, running from 2019 through 2026. Each edition has its own ballot address on the Second Street host, from Best-In-Town-2019 through Best-in-Town-2025, with the 2026 ballot at the Best-in-Town-2026-2 address. The 2026 window opened on May 26, 2026 and closed on July 27, 2026, a span from late May into late July.

Earlier editions fell in the same seasonal span: the platform dates for the series run from a May 30, 2019 start to the July 27, 2026 close. That makes late spring and summer the period to watch for a Tyler business hoping to be named on the ballot.

What the organizer has not published anywhere alongside the ballot is the category roster for the 2026 edition, and no per-supporter vote limit or eligibility terms appear with it either; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

The next edition has not been scheduled publicly. Given the annual pattern from 2019 through 2026, a 2027 edition is the shape to expect, but the Tyler Morning Telegraph has not announced dates, so watch tylerpaper.com rather than assuming the May-to-July window repeats.

How a supporter votes in Best in Town today

Voting in Best in Town happens on the Second Street ballot at the address above, during the window the Tyler Morning Telegraph sets each year. Because the promotion is typed as a nomination and voting ballot, a supporter's path runs through both halves: a business can be put forward during the nomination phase, and votes are then cast for the nominees that appear.

The 2026 ballot followed that combined format between May 26 and July 27, 2026. In practice a supporter opens the ballot address in a browser, moves through the categories the ballot displays that year, and submits a choice in each. The listing this program sits in does not state whether an account is required or what repeat-visit rule the newspaper applies; those terms appear on the live ballot itself while a window is open.

Since the 2026 ballot is closed, a Tyler supporter who wants to take part today is waiting on the next edition rather than a live form. When the newspaper opens the next ballot, the same address pattern on secondstreetapp.com will carry it, and the nomination and voting flow will run again under whatever terms that year's ballot prints.

Where Best in Town sits among Texas readers' choice ballots

Best in Town is a single-newspaper market ballot, and that separates it from the large Texas readers' choice programs this site covers. In the big metros, the Best of Houston ballot, the Best of San Antonio program, the Best of Dallas Readers' Choice ballot and the Best of Austin Readers Poll each cover a major city under a separate organizer. Best of El Paso and Best of Fort Worth, the latter run by Fort Worth Magazine, fill out the set.

Tyler sits apart from all of them. Best in Town is the Tyler Morning Telegraph's own program rather than an edition of any metro title, and its scale follows the paper's home city rather than a metro population. That matters for a business deciding where to campaign: a nomination in Best in Town carries weight only in this ballot, and a vote in the Houston or Dallas programs does nothing for a Tyler listing.

The links above lead to each Texas neighbour's own page, where the same structure of organizer, platform and window is set out for that market.

Strengthening support for a Best in Town nomination

A business named on the Best in Town ballot has two levers: the nomination phase and the vote count. The Tyler Morning Telegraph has not printed rules about outside help, paid promotion or voting software alongside the ballot listing, so a campaign should stay inside what the live ballot allows while a window is open.

What is known is the format: a nomination and voting ballot on Second Street, open each year from late May into late July. Support that depends on the ballot's own mechanics, asking customers to nominate early and return to vote, fits that format directly.

For a wider view of tactics that work on public-vote ballots, see our votes guide at get more votes online, and for the legal position on purchased votes see is buying votes legal. The service pages at buy votes online and buy award votes describe packages, but no vote purchase, ours included, promises a win in a readers' choice ballot.