Best Of Permian Basin: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Best Of Permian Basin program is and who runs it

Best Of Permian Basin is a readers' choice awards program run by the Odessa American, the daily newspaper based in Odessa, Texas that serves Odessa and Ector County. This is a business readers' choice ballot of the best-of kind: readers nominate and then vote for their favorite local businesses, and the businesses with the most support in each group earn recognition from the paper.

The voting ballot is hosted on Second Street, a balloting platform that many publishers use for readers' choice contests. For this program the ballot lives at oaoa.secondstreetapp.com under the Odessa American's own subdomain, and the 2025 page titled itself "2025 Best of Permian Basin" with the invitation to check it out. The confirmed voting address for the most recent edition is the page at oaoa.secondstreetapp.com/Best-of-Permian-Basin-2025/.

Two practical notes follow from that setup. First, because the newspaper owns the program rather than licensing it out, questions about categories, rules and results go to the Odessa American rather than to a national contest operator. Second, the Second Street host means the interface will look familiar to anyone who has voted in another publisher's readers' poll on the same platform, though each contest sets its own rules independently.

The dated history: confirmed editions and the 2025 window

Confirmed editions of Best Of Permian Basin ran in 2022, 2023 and 2025. The 2025 edition is the one with a live, directly confirmed ballot, and its voting round is the anchor fact for this page: voting opened March 31, 2025 and closed April 25, 2025. The Odessa American promoted the close with the line "Vote now till April 25th for your favorite businesses in the Best of the Permian Basin 2025 Readers' Choice contest."

A nomination round preceded that voting window. A law firm writing about its own win in the program described it this way: "Voting for the Best of the Permian Basin took place through April 25, 2025, and included hundreds of nominations across a wide range of categories." That account confirms a two-stage shape, nominations first and voting after, for the 2025 cycle.

Behind those stages, detail is thin. The Odessa American has not printed a category roster or a per-person voting rule on the page this program is anchored to; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The same holds for the exact nomination dates in 2025 and for any 2026 round dates, which no announcement quoted here supplies.

The gap between 2023 and 2025 in the confirmed years is also worth reading plainly: a 2024 edition does not appear among the confirmed years on this page. Whether the paper skipped that year or simply left no ballot trace is not stated anywhere in the material behind this program, so the honest summary is three confirmed editions and a next expected run in 2026.

How a supporter votes on the Permian Basin ballot today

Backing a nominated business here means one open action on the Second Street ballot at the Odessa American's subdomain: find the category, select the entry, submit. No purchase, ticket or membership is described anywhere on the ballot page, and the program's own promotion calls it a readers' choice contest, which is the standard open-vote shape.

Because the 2025 window has closed, the literal answer for a supporter arriving now depends on the next edition. The confirmed editions run 2022, 2023 and 2025, and the pattern points toward a 2026 ballot, but no 2026 dates appear in the material behind this page. When a new window opens, the ballot address will follow the same subdomain, with the year in the path as it was in 2025.

Two rules matter more than any other detail and neither is published here. Whether one person may vote once per day, once per category or once per edition goes unstated on the ballot page. So does any requirement to register an email before the vote counts. Both of those behaviors differ between Second Street contests, so the prompts shown on the live ballot are the only reliable source for them.

For a business owner, the practical reading is that every supporter's single action is small: find the category, pick the entry, submit. That is what the organizer's own description of a readers' choice contest implies, and it is all that can be stated without inventing rules the ballot does not print.

How this ballot sits beside the other Texas readers' polls

Texas carries several large readers' choice programs, and Best Of Permian Basin is the one anchored to the state's mid-sized oil-country press rather than to a metro daily. The nearest comparisons on this site are the Best of Austin Readers Poll, the Best of Dallas Readers' Choice and the Best of El Paso, each run under a different publisher with its own window and rules.

The same distinction holds against the bigger markets. The Best of Houston, the Best of San Antonio and Best of Fort Worth each cover a single large metro under separate management, while the Permian Basin ballot serves Odessa and Ector County through one newspaper. A business operating in several Texas cities would therefore enter and campaign in each program separately, and a rule from one carries no weight in the others.

What makes the Permian Basin ballot distinct within this group is its confirmed history. Three edition years, 2022, 2023 and 2025, are on file, with the 2025 round precisely dated from March 31 to April 25. Not every regional Texas program can show both a multi-year run and a dated window for its latest edition, and that combination is what makes this page a useful reference for anyone tracking the state's readers' choice circuit.

Strengthening support in the Permian Basin ballot without breaking its rules

Every fact above points to the same conclusion for a nominated business: the contest rewards organized, honest participation. The organizer publishes no per-person limit and no outside-help policy on the ballot page, which means the risk is not a published rule but the platform's own fraud handling, which can void suspicious vote batches. Support gathered from real customers and readers is the only kind the ballot is built to count.

The window matters as much as the method. The 2025 round lasted under a month, from March 31 to April 25, so a campaign planned around asking customers early, then reminding them near the close, fits the shape of the contest better than a single late push. Share the Second Street ballot link, name the exact category, and make the ask simple.

For general questions about how paid vote services work, what they cost and where they are legitimate, see our votes guide and our guide to earning more votes. Victory in a readers' choice ballot is never promised by any vote service, the Odessa American's rules always govern what counts in this contest.