Bestoffc2016: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Best of Falls Church vote is and who runs it

The Best of Falls Church ballot is the reader-vote program of the Falls Church News-Press, a newspaper publishing from Falls Church in Virginia. The paper runs the contest at fcnp.com itself, with no external polling service involved, and the ballot for the 2016-labelled edition sits at fcnp.com/bestoffc2016/. Readers pick favorite local businesses, and the paper celebrates the winners in a printed special edition.

Three facts anchor the program. The organizer is a newspaper, not an events company or a chamber of commerce, so the vote is editorial content tied to the paper's coverage of the Falls Church business community. The host is the paper's own domain, fcnp.com, which means the rules, the ballot and the results all live under the same roof, with no external contest portal in between. And nothing stands between a reader and the ballot: no jury, no ticketed event, no entry fee.

Because the publisher and the host are the same organization, a reader looking for the current rules never has to reconcile two sources. Whatever the paper prints at fcnp.com about the vote is the operative rule set for the Falls Church market.

The dated record for the 2026 cycle and the editions before it

The 2026 cycle has a printed shape. The nomination period ran from June 25, 2026 to July 12, 2026, after which the paper published its finalists and opened the final voting period, which runs from July 16 through August 10, 2026 at midnight. The finalists page carries its own line saying voting ends August 15, and announces that winners will be featured in a special BEST OF FALLS CHURCH edition of the News-Press on August 25.

Confirmed editions of the vote ran in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2026. That list makes the 2026 cycle a return after a gap in the confirmed years rather than a debut, and it means the 2016 label on the ballot URL is a naming habit of the publisher, not a sign that the vote stopped after that year.

The News-Press has not printed the roster of Best of Falls Church categories on the ballot page; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The rules page also stops short of saying how often a single supporter may return during the voting window, so a reader planning multiple visits should rely on whatever the current ballot itself instructs.

Everything dated above comes from the paper's own pages for this vote. Where the paper prints a date, the date governs; where it prints nothing, nothing else should be substituted for it.

How a supporter votes on the Falls Church ballot today

Voting in the Best of Falls Church reader vote is a browser task on the paper's own site. A supporter loads the ballot at fcnp.com, finds the category they care about, and selects one business per category, which is the rule the paper states plainly: participants may vote for only one business per category. Because the News-Press hosts the ballot itself, there is no external polling platform to sign into, and the page's own troubleshooting note points readers who hit problems toward a direct link to the ballot.

What the printed rules do not settle is frequency. The one-business-per-category rule governs a single pass through a category; whether the same supporter may come back the next day and select again in that category is not addressed on the pages the paper publishes. A careful supporter treats the printed rule as the ceiling: one selection per category per visit, and any repeat visit only after reading what the live ballot allows.

The nomination round works in reverse. Between June 25 and July 12 a supporter proposes a business, and the businesses that emerge as finalists form the ballot for the July 16 to August 10 voting period. A business that missed the nomination window is not on the finalist ballot, so outreach during the voting weeks is aimed at supporters of businesses already listed.

How this ballot sits beside its Virginia neighbours

The Falls Church ballot sits in a crowded Virginia best-of field, and each neighbour answers to a different publisher. Best of Arlington is the closest geographic cousin, covering the market next to Falls Church. BroadwayWorld Central Virginia Awards and BroadwayWorld NOVA Awards cover theatre rather than local business, each under the BroadwayWorld umbrella for a different region. Best of Coastal Virginia Magazine serves the coastal side of the state, while Best of Charlottesville and the Daily Progress Charlottesville Readers' Choice give the Charlottesville market separate reader votes from separate publishers.

What separates the Falls Church program from all of them is scale and host. It is a city-level ballot run by the city's own newspaper on the newspaper's own domain, not a regional magazine franchise and not a shared contest portal. For a reader comparing Virginia reader votes, that means the rules, the dates and the category list for Falls Church are found only at fcnp.com, and each sibling program above carries its own window, its own publisher and its own rules.

That independence cuts both ways. A rule printed for another Virginia best-of vote, however similar it looks, has no force on the Falls Church ballot, and a date from an Arlington or Charlottesville program says nothing about when the News-Press opens or closes its own window.

Strengthening support within this ballot's rules

Support in this vote is won category by category. Because the printed rule limits a participant to one business per category, a nominated business competes only against the other finalists in its own line, and in a single-city field every supporter reached can matter. The practical work is local: customers who already visit the shop, reminded while the July 16 to August 10 window is open and pointed at the exact category where the business appears. General tactics that do not fit a newspaper-run ballot, such as anything the printed rules do not provide for, should stay off the table. Our guide to earning more support covers outreach that works within an organizer's rules, and the paper's own ballot page remains the only authority on what those rules are for Falls Church.