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

Who votes and why the Lubbock ballot exists

The Best of Lubbock Community's Choice Awards is built on a simple premise: the people who live and spend in Lubbock, Texas, are the ones who decide which businesses and organizations deserve recognition. The program is presented by Gannett's USA TODAY Network paper for Lubbock, and the ballot lives at yourchoiceawards.com/lubbock/ on Your Choice Awards, the network's community awards site. Its own description says the awards celebrate the leading businesses and organizations across the Lubbock area, and the program credits community members directly, noting that it could not recognize more than 540 businesses and organizations each year without them.

That community framing shapes the whole structure. The program starts with public nominations, meaning any supporter can put a favorite local company forward during the nomination window. After nominations close, the five leading nominees in every category advance into the voting round, where the public again decides the finalists and winners. Nothing is decided by a panel or an editorial board; the two decisive stages, nominating and voting, are both open to the public.

The vertical is best-of, the classic community awards format that Gannett markets run across the country, and the audience is local: residents, customers, clients and fans of Lubbock-area organizations. A business's standing on the ballot is a direct read on how many people care enough to return day after day, which is why the program's own materials lean so hard on participation rather than on judging.

The 2026 schedule and what the program has confirmed

The 2026 cycle runs in three published phases. The Nomination Round ran May 4-25, 2026, under the banner that it all begins with nominations. The Voting Round follows, July 9-23, 2026, and the program explains that after nominations, the leading companies in each category advance to the voting round. Winners are announced October 6, 2026, once voting ends.

Confirmed editions of the program run in 2025 and 2026 on the Your Choice Awards site, which makes it an annual program. The 2026 ballot is the live edition, and the market's promotion listing attaches the July 9-23 voting window to this program as its own entry.

On scale, the program page states that each year the Best of Lubbock Community's Choice Awards recognizes more than 540 businesses and organizations, and that it could not do it without community members. The ballot's breadth, from restaurants to service firms, is what makes a daily-return habit worthwhile for a nominee's supporters.

What the program page does not print is the eligibility side of the rules: who may be nominated, how entries are screened, and what happens to votes the organizer considers irregular. Those terms are not on the page; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Phase dates for a 2027 edition are likewise unpublished so far.

How to cast a vote on the Lubbock ballot today

The mechanic is deliberately plain. The program's own instruction reads: to vote for a company, go to its category on the ballot and select Vote near its name. There is no judging form, no essay, no ranking. A supporter finds the category, finds the business, and presses the button beside it.

The frequency rule is equally plain. The program page allows one vote in each category on every day the round runs. In practice that means a supporter who wants to maximize support for a favorite Lubbock business returns each day from July 9 through July 23, 2026, and casts a fresh vote in that business's category every 24 hours. The rule is per category, so supporting a restaurant on one line and a salon on another in the same visit is not restricted by it.

Because the ballot spans so many Lubbock business types, navigation matters more than effort. The site organizes the program under How It Works, Categories, Awards Gala, Winners Section, Business Resources and FAQ, so a supporter can move straight to the relevant section rather than scrolling the full list. Nominations are closed for 2026, so the only action available now is voting for the companies that already advanced.

No purchase or registration is described anywhere in the voting instructions; the ballot describes a select-and-confirm action open to the public during the round.

Where the Lubbock ballot sits among Texas best-of programs

Lubbock is one market in a wider Texas family of community choice ballots. The same state carries the Best of Austin Readers Poll, the Best of Dallas Readers' Choice, Best of El Paso, Best of Houston, Best of San Antonio, and the Best of Fort Worth program. Each is its own program with a separate organizer, ballot and schedule, so a vote cast in Lubbock carries no weight toward any of them.

What distinguishes the Lubbock edition is its host and its scale claims. It runs on Your Choice Awards under Gannett's USA TODAY Network paper for Lubbock, and its published figure, more than 540 recognized businesses and organizations each year, describes a program that covers the whole breadth of a mid-sized market rather than a single industry.

Its three-phase rhythm also matters for supporters. Because nominations close before voting opens, a business that misses the May nomination window cannot appear on the July ballot at all. In markets where the nomination and voting stages overlap, a late campaign can still enter; in Lubbock, the calendar is sequential, which makes the nomination round the gate every local campaign has to clear first.

Strengthening support for a Lubbock nominee within the rules

The rules here reward consistency, not bursts. Since the ballot allows one vote per category per day through July 23, 2026, the most effective legitimate push is a daily reminder: a morning email to your list, a counter sign at the register, or a pinned post with the direct link to your category on yourchoiceawards.com/lubbock/. Supporters who return daily are worth far more than a one-time share, because the ballot counts each day's vote separately.

The organizer's structure also gives you a deadline that is real. Voting closes July 23 and winners are revealed October 6, so a campaign that starts on day one of the round has the full window to build a habit among customers. Ask once at the point of sale and again by email, and make the ask specific: name the category, name the business, and give the link.

For a fuller playbook that fits a daily-return ballot like this one, see our votes guide. It covers outreach that stays inside the organizer's terms rather than shortcuts that risk the votes you already earned.