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

What the Best of Amarillo Community's Choice Awards is and who runs it

The Best of Amarillo Community's Choice Awards is a community-vote recognition program for businesses and organizations in the Amarillo, Texas area. The organizer is the Gannett / USA TODAY Network local paper, and the page carries the copyright of USA TODAY NETWORK Ventures, which places the program inside the same publishing family that operates community choice ballots in a number of Gannett markets. The program's own description says it celebrates the top local companies and groups around Amarillo, and that each year it recognizes over 540 businesses and organizations thanks to community involvement.

The ballot runs on Your Choice Awards, the publisher's dedicated contest site, at yourchoiceawards.com/amarillo/. That address is the live ballot for the Amarillo market, and every phase of the program, from nominations to the winners list, lives on it. The vertical is the familiar best-of format: residents nominate local companies, the field is narrowed, and the community votes on the finalists.

The scale of the program is stated in its own numbers. The site says supporters nominate and vote for favorite companies across a broad slate of categories, which makes this one of the broader local business ballots in the Texas Panhandle market. Participation is open to the local community, in the program's own wording: "We put the power in your hands, the local community, to nominate and vote for your favorite companies."

Program facts at a glance

The dated record: editions, phases and what is not published

The program's confirmed runs are the 2025 and 2026 editions. Of those, only the 2026 cycle carries a full published calendar, and it ran in three phases. The nomination round opened the program and ran May 4-25, 2026, under the banner "It all begins with nominations." After nominations closed, the top companies in each category moved on to the voting round, which ran July 9-23, 2026. Once voting ended, the organizer set the winners announcement for October 15, 2026, with the site noting that excitement builds as the team prepares to reveal the winners.

The 2025 edition is confirmed as a run of the program, but the material held for this program does not carry that edition's phase dates, so its calendar cannot be quoted here. The program is annual, and the 2026 page's own language about recognizing businesses "each year" supports that cadence. A 2027 edition has not been dated anywhere in the material held for this program.

Two facts about the ballot are not published in the material held for this program. The individual category names behind the broad slate are not listed, and the eligibility conditions for nominating or voting are not printed either. Neither the category roster nor the eligibility terms appear in the published material for this program; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

One dated promotion row matches this program exactly: the voting round entry for July 9-23, 2026, matched against the Amarillo ballot address. That row and the page's own phase banners agree with each other, which makes the July window the most firmly dated fact on the page.

How a supporter votes in the Amarillo ballot today

On this ballot, a supporter casts a plain public vote subject to a daily ceiling. The program's own text states: "Here, users can vote up to once a day for their favorites to determine the winners!" That sentence defines the whole supporter experience: no purchase, no membership and no special status are mentioned as requirements, only the once-a-day ceiling that applies to every user on the ballot.

The sequence a supporter follows is set by the phase calendar. In the 2026 cycle, a supporter who wanted a specific Amarillo business on the ballot first nominated it during the May 4-25 nomination round. Once nominations closed, the top companies in each category advanced, and from July 9 to July 23 the supporter could return to the ballot each day and cast a vote for that finalist. After the voting round closed on July 23, the ballot stopped accepting votes and the program moved toward the October 15 winners announcement.

The daily-return mechanic is the part supporters most often get wrong. A single visit during the voting round contributes one vote, while a supporter who returns on many days across the July window multiplies their own impact without breaking any rule, because the once-a-day allowance is the organizer's own stated limit. Businesses that grasp this point build their whole campaign around daily reminders rather than one big push.

The ballot page also carries a participation incentive: a chance to be entered to win a $250 gift voucher. The page text ties that entry to taking part, though the detailed conditions sit on the live site rather than in the material held for this program.

How the Amarillo ballot sits beside its Texas neighbours

Amarillo's program is one of a family of Texas community-vote ballots, each anchored to its own city. The nearest structural cousins on this site are the Best of Austin Readers Poll, the Best of Dallas Readers' Choice, the Best of El Paso, the Best of Houston, the Best of San Antonio and Best of Fort Worth. Each of those serves a different metro, and none of them shares a ballot with Amarillo.

What marks the Amarillo program out within that family is its publisher and its platform. It is the Gannett / USA TODAY Network local paper's entry for the Panhandle market, running on the Your Choice Awards platform, while other Texas markets answer to their own publishers and sometimes to different contest hosts. A supporter moving from the Dallas ballot to the Amarillo ballot will find a different page, different phase dates and a different category roster, even though the nominate-then-vote shape is common to the format.

The market itself matters too. Amarillo is a single-city program rather than a statewide one, so the businesses on the ballot are Amarillo-area companies and organizations, and the audience that decides the winners is the local community. The program's claim of recognizing over 540 businesses and organizations each year gives a sense of how much of the local economy the ballot touches.

For a reader comparing programs, the practical differences are the calendar and the rules. Amarillo's 2026 calendar ran nominations in May, voting in July and winners in October; another city's program may run a different calendar entirely, so each ballot should be read on its own page rather than assumed to match.

Strengthening support for an Amarillo nominee within the rules

Because the Amarillo ballot allows one vote per user per day, the most effective legitimate push is a daily reminder campaign. A business that asks every customer, once a day, throughout the July voting window turns the organizer's own limit into a structure: each day is a fresh opportunity, and no supporter has to guess whether their vote counted. The program's own text, "users can vote up to once a day for their favorites," is the rule to build around.

The nomination phase matters as much as the vote. In 2026 only the top companies in each category after the May 4-25 nomination round advanced to voting, so a business that misses the nomination push has no ballot position to defend in July. Planning for the next edition therefore starts with the nomination window, not the voting one.

As for outside assistance, the published mechanic is the once-a-day public vote, and any assistance a business buys or arranges has to work inside that limit and inside whatever terms the ballot page prints. Votes the organizer judges invalid are at risk of removal, so a push that respects the daily rule is the durable one. Our award-votes page explains how support for community-choice ballots like this one is generally approached, and the votes guide covers outreach that stays inside a ballot's published rules rather than guessing at them.