Best Of Readers' Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Best Of Readers' Choice Awards is and who runs it

The Best Of Readers' Choice Awards is the readers' choice program of Lynchburg Living Magazine, a publication serving the greater Lynchburg, Virginia area. Readers use it to support "the places you frequent and the people you love here in the greater" Lynchburg region, which places the program firmly in the regional best-of vertical: local businesses, services and people, ranked by the audience of a city magazine, not by a judging panel.

Nomination and voting happen directly on lynchburgliving.com. Programs that rent space on an external contest service are common in this vertical; Lynchburg Living instead hosts the ballot inside its own site, on pages titled "Best of Lynchburg Nomination and Voting." The current ballot address is lynchburgliving.com/2027-best-of-lynchburg-nomination-and-voting/, and the magazine also maintains a Best Of Voting Toolkit and a Best Of Top Lawyers Resource Guide alongside the main contest, which shows how central the program is to the publication's calendar.

The organizer is named on the ballot itself. Lynchburg Living reserves the right to modify any categories and contestants, a standard reservation for a readers' choice program whose category roster changes with local advertisers and reader interest. The table below gathers the program's fixed details.

Confirmed editions and the 2026 voting window

The program has a long dated history. Confirmed editions of the Best Of Readers' Choice Awards ran in 2019, 2020, 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026, which is the basis for treating it as an annual program on this page. The list comes from the years the program's own pages have shown; the gaps between 2020 and 2023 simply reflect years for which no confirming page exists, not years the magazine skipped.

The 2026 cycle is the most fully dated. The Lynchburg Best Of Awards voting period runs July 24 through September 15, 2026, and it divides into two phases. The nomination round runs July 24 through August 17, 2026, during which a supporter's nomination in a category counts as a vote. The finalist round follows from August 21 through September 15, 2026, when the ballot narrows to the leading nominees and final voting decides the winners.

One reservation belongs to the organizer rather than to any single cycle: Lynchburg Living reserves the right to modify any categories and contestants. That means the category roster and the shape of each round can change from one edition to the next even though the July-through-September rhythm has held. The full round structure for any future edition, including exact platform dates beyond the published nomination and finalist windows, is a detail to confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How a supporter votes in the Lynchburg Best Of ballot

Voting in the Lynchburg Best Of ballot is a straightforward public process, and the published rule is specific: "You may vote one time per category for the duration of the contest (a nomination counts as a vote!)." That single sentence carries three facts a supporter needs. The limit is per category, not per person across the whole ballot. It lasts for the entire contest, so an early action in a category is final for that category. And a nomination is not a separate preliminary step; it is itself a vote.

In practice a supporter opens the Best of Lynchburg Nomination and Voting page on lynchburgliving.com during the nomination round, which runs July 24 through August 17, 2026, and enters the Lynchburg area business or person they want to recognize. When the finalist round opens on August 21 and runs through September 15, 2026, the same ballot presents the leading nominees and the supporter casts their one vote per category among them.

The timing matters because of the one-vote rule. A reader who nominates a favorite in July has spent that category's single vote, even if the entry does not reach the finalist list in August. A reader who waits until the finalist round can vote only among the published finalists. Businesses that understand this usually ask supporters to act early in the nomination window, since a nomination both registers support and locks in the vote. The rules and regulations link on the ballot page is the authoritative statement of the current cycle's terms.

How the Lynchburg ballot sits among Virginia readers' choice programs

Virginia carries a dense set of regional best-of programs, and every one of them has a separate publisher behind it. Within this page's own market group, the neighbours are Best of Arlington, the BroadwayWorld Central Virginia Awards, the BroadwayWorld NOVA Awards, Best of Coastal Virginia Magazine, Best of Charlottesville and the Daily Progress Charlottesville Readers' Choice.

What distinguishes the Lynchburg program is its host and its market. It belongs to Lynchburg Living Magazine, a city magazine rather than a daily newspaper or a national theatre network, and it covers the greater Lynchburg area in central Virginia rather than the Arlington, Charlottesville or coastal markets its neighbours serve. A business physically located in Lynchburg cannot be voted for in the Arlington or Charlottesville ballots, and vice versa, so the geography decides which of these programs matters to a given supporter.

The hosting choice also sets it apart. Several regional ballots run on dedicated contest platforms, while this one lives on lynchburgliving.com itself, inside the magazine's own site structure alongside its Best Of Voting Toolkit and special sections. For a supporter, that means the ballot, the rules and the results all sit under one publisher's domain. For a business weighing where to invest outreach during a July-through-September window, the relevant comparison is not which program is bigger but which program's readers actually frequent the business, and for a Lynchburg area shop that is this one.

Strengthening support within the one-vote-per-category rule

Because the ballot allows one vote per category for the duration of the contest, and a nomination counts as a vote, outreach in this program is about reach and timing rather than repetition. The nomination round from July 24 to August 17, 2026 is when a Lynchburg area business should ask its regulars to act, since every nomination is a vote banked immediately. The finalist round from August 21 to September 15, 2026 is a second, separate push aimed at readers who waited.

Lynchburg Living's published rules are the boundary for outside help: the magazine reserves the right to modify any categories and contestants, and its rules and regulations page governs each cycle. Encouraging genuine customers to nominate and vote fits a readers' choice program's purpose; anything that generates votes from people with no connection to the business sits outside the spirit the magazine describes. For a fuller treatment of legitimate promotion, see how to get more votes online, and for the rules question specifically, the legality guide covers what organizers typically permit.