Readers' Choice 2026 (southlakestylemagazine): How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Southlake Style Readers' Choice program is

Readers' Choice is the annual best-of ballot that Southlake Style, a lifestyle magazine serving Southlake, Texas, publishes for its readers. The magazine has covered the community since 2006, and the ballot is one of several interactive programs it runs for local readers and the businesses they favor. The legal operator behind the publication and its promotions is Greenhouse Ventures, which is the organization named on the Second Street account that hosts the vote.

Technically the program runs as a Ballot/NominationAndVotingBallot on Second Street, the balloting platform widely used by local publishers for readers' choice contests. The 2026 ballot lives at southlakestylemagazine.secondstreetapp.com/Readers-Choice-2026, on the magazine's own subdomain of the Second Street app.

In the wider market, this program is a hyperlocal entry in the best-of vertical. Texas readers' polls at Best of Austin Readers Poll, Best of Dallas Readers' Choice, Best of El Paso, Best of Houston, Best of San Antonio and Best of Fort Worth serve big metros. Southlake Style's ballot serves one affluent suburb, which changes both who competes and who decides.

Dated editions, the 2026 window and what is not printed

The program's confirmed run is unusually complete for a local readers' ballot. Seven editions are confirmed: editions ran in 2020 and 2021, again in 2022 and 2023, then in 2024 and 2025, and once more in 2026. That is an unbroken annual stretch on the same Second Street account, and it is the strongest single signal that the program is a settled part of Southlake Style's yearly calendar rather than a one-off experiment bolted onto the magazine.

The 2026 cycle has a printed window. Voting opened on January 8, 2026 and closed on February 23, 2026, a mid-winter stretch of roughly seven weeks. The ballot is now closed; anyone visiting the 2026 address sees the concluded edition rather than a live vote. Earlier editions on the account, including the 2025 and 2024 ballots, sit at their own addresses on the same subdomain.

Just as useful is knowing what the ballot page omits. It carries no eligibility terms, no statement of who may vote or where a voter must live, and no published set of anti-fraud rules. Southlake Style's readers-choice guidance elsewhere does tell supporters they can vote once per day, and anything beyond that, including next cycle's exact dates and terms, should be confirmed on the live ballot each cycle.

How a supporter votes on the Readers' Choice ballot

Voting here is deliberately simple, which is why the once-per-day rule matters so much. A supporter opens the ballot on the southlakestylemagazine.secondstreetapp.com domain, browses the category list until they reach the business or individual they want to recognize, selects that nominee, and submits. The Second Street ballot format is a standard web form, so the whole action takes well under a minute on a phone.

The publisher's own instruction is the key detail: Southlake Style tells readers they can vote once per day. That turns the program from a single click into a habit. A restaurant regular, a salon client or a patient who remembers the ballot on ten separate days delivers ten times the weight of someone who votes once and forgets. Businesses that do well in this program are usually the ones that build that reminder into their January and February routine, when the window has historically run.

Nomination and voting are combined in the ballot type Second Street classifies as a NominationAndVotingBallot, so the same form handles a supporter's entire participation. There is no separate registration step described on the ballot page, and no published requirement beyond the daily limit Southlake Style itself states. If the publisher ever adds login requirements or residency rules, those will appear on the live ballot before anywhere else, because the ballot page is the single authoritative surface for this program.

How this ballot sits among Texas readers' choice programs

Every serious readers' choice program in Texas runs on a different publisher's audience, and this one is defined by its scale. Southlake Style speaks to one city and its immediate readership, not a metro area. That makes the ballot intensely local: a nominee wins not by name recognition across North Texas but by mobilizing a relatively small base of Southlake regulars, day after day, for the length of the window.

The comparison set on this site makes the contrast concrete. The Best of Dallas Readers' Choice and Best of Fort Worth draw from metro-scale populations. The Best of Austin Readers Poll, Best of Houston and Best of San Antonio are big-city institutions. A Southlake business could easily sit inside two of those markets' catchments, but only Southlake Style's ballot is won entirely by its own suburb's voters.

The platform is the other differentiator. Second Street's Ballot format, with its combined nomination-and-voting flow and its daily-vote convention, shapes how campaigns here work: reminders, repeats and routine beat one-shot pushes. When a business weighs where its supporter energy goes, this program rewards depth of local loyalty more than raw reach, which is exactly what a suburban magazine's readership provides. Neighbouring-market ballots reward the opposite.

Strengthening support in this ballot specifically

Because Southlake Style's ballot runs on a once-per-day mechanic, effective support in this program is a calendar exercise. The window has run in mid-winter, so the work belongs in January and February: tell customers at the counter, pin the ballot link to social profiles, and send one reminder at open and another in the final week. Daily repeat votes from a modest, loyal base routinely outperform a single burst of shares from a larger one.

The organizer's stated position on outside help is simply the daily rule; nothing further about automated voting or bulk support is printed on the ballot, so any campaign that leans on purchased volume carries the risk that the publisher's terms, whatever they say, disallow it. Before committing budget, read the live rules on the ballot itself, and compare the economics against simply mobilizing the customers you already have. General tactics that transfer to this kind of daily-vote ballot are set out in our guide to getting more votes online, and the option of purchased support is described plainly at buy award votes.