Times Argus Best of the Best: How Voting Works & How to Win

April 16 to May 14. An actual date range, not a guess

Four weeks. That's the confirmed span of the 2025 Times Argus Best of the Best public vote, opening April 16 and closing May 14. Compare that to the sibling Rutland Herald ballot, hosted on the exact same SecondStreet software one county over, which has run four confirmed cycles without ever publishing a locked calendar in advance. Washington County entrants get something Rutland County entrants don't: an actual date to build a campaign around.

The Barre Montpelier Times Argus, part of New England Newspapers and vtcng.com, runs the ballot. It covers 80-plus categories across Washington County businesses, everything a reader in Barre or Montpelier might vote on in a given year.

Why does that shared platform matter to a Barre business owner? Because a search for "best of the best Vermont" surfaces both ballots on nearly identical URLs, and mixing them up costs a business the entire window if supporters end up voting on the wrong county's page. The Vermont contest hub lists both, side by side, along with what else runs statewide.

Same software, two newsrooms, zero shared votes

Here's the part that trips up new entrants every cycle: the Times Argus ballot address literally contains the word "rutlandherald." That's not a mistake. Both papers are New England Newspapers titles running on the identical SecondStreet build, one hosting domain serving two entirely separate contests.

What actually differs between the two

Editorially, the Times Argus and Rutland Herald are separate newsrooms with separate readerships. The Times Argus draws from Washington County, the Barre-Montpelier corridor; the Rutland Herald draws from Rutland County, forty-some minutes south. Neither ballot's category list, vote count, or results page touches the other's.

A business with locations in both counties, a contractor working Barre and Rutland job sites, say, needs two separate campaigns, not one shared push. For the general mechanics behind readers-choice awards of this type, see award-style vote campaigns, and for the closest sibling comparison, Rutland Herald Best of the Best covers the identical platform from the other county's side.

Eighty-plus categories means the wrong lane costs real votes

A Montpelier bakery and a Barre auto-body shop have nothing in common except sharing a Washington County ZIP code cluster. Both compete in this ballot, but never against each other. Eighty-plus categories exist precisely so a bakery's customers aren't asked to weigh in on which mechanic does the best brake job.

Picking the right category label matters more than most first-time entrants assume. Get it wrong and the nomination sits in a lane its own customers never think to check.

Restaurants specifically can pull additional tactics from restaurant vote campaign planning, and any Washington County entrant chasing a broader annual business recognition can compare notes with best business of the year voting, which covers overlapping ground. For the basics of reaching the right customer segment inside any single category, getting people to vote for you covers ground that applies regardless of which of the 80-plus lanes a business sits in.

Barre, Montpelier, and the towns around them don't vote the same way

Barre and Montpelier anchor Washington County, but the ballot's real reach runs wider, into Waterbury, Waitsfield, Northfield, Berlin, and smaller towns like Plainfield, Marshfield, and Moretown. Each carries a distinct customer rhythm even inside one county-wide ballot.

Montpelier, the state capital, skews toward a professional and civic-adjacent customer base, state employees, lobbyists, university-adjacent traffic from Vermont College. Barre carries a working-town identity built on its granite-quarrying history, and its retail and service businesses tend to draw from long-standing family relationships rather than transient foot traffic. Waterbury and Waitsfield lean tourism-adjacent, Waitsfield especially, given its proximity to Sugarbush; a lodge or restaurant there benefits from reaching last season's guest list, not just year-round locals.

None of these towns are official contest divisions on the ballot itself. They're simply where the real Washington County customer base actually lives, and a generic county-wide push wastes reach on people who were never the business's own audience to begin with.

What the shared SecondStreet platform doesn't tell you

No public results archive exists for prior Times Argus Best of the Best cycles beyond what the paper itself has published for the confirmed 2025 window. That gap isn't unique to this contest, it's standard across most SecondStreet-hosted readers-choice ballots, where category labels and even category counts can shift from one year to the next.

So treat the April 16-May 14, 2025 window as the anchor point for this program, not a permanent fixture. A future cycle's dates, category list, or vote-repeat rule should be confirmed against the live ballot at rutlandherald.secondstreetapp.com/2025-Times-Argus-Best-of-the-Best/ rather than assumed from this year's numbers.

Promoting a placement before the Times Argus confirms it in print or online risks a claim the paper hasn't actually made. Building a real campaign, real customers pointed at the correct category during the open window, survives scrutiny. See how online contest votes work for the mechanics behind ballots built this way, and real votes guidance for the standard that separates a legitimate push from one that risks the whole entry.