Best of Auburn 2026: How Voting Works & How to Win

What Best of Auburn 2026 is and who runs it

Best of Auburn 2026 is a readers' choice business ballot for Auburn, Washington, run by the Auburn Reporter. The Auburn Reporter is a newspaper registered in Washington, and this ballot is its best-of program: the kind of promotion where local readers pick favorites among area businesses. The vertical here is business recognition, not sports, entertainment or politics.

Second Street is the balloting platform behind the promotion, at the address auburnreporter2.secondstreetapp.com. The promotion type is listed as a Ballot/NominationAndVotingBallot, which is Second Street's combined format: nominating a business and voting for one happen inside the same promotion rather than in separate nomination and voting rounds.

What separates this program from most other Washington readers' choice ballots is scale. It is a single-city ballot tied to one newspaper's market, while several of its neighbours on this site cover a county, a region or the whole western half of the state. That narrower scope is the program's character: fewer categories in play, a local audience, and a paper whose name is on the ballot.

The dated record: editions, the 2026 window and what is unpublished

Three editions of the ballot are confirmed on the Auburn Reporter's Second Street host: 2024, 2025 and 2026. The 2024 edition has its own promotion address under a Best-Of-Auburn-Voting-2024 path, the 2025 edition ran under the shorter Best-of-Auburn path, and the 2026 edition carries the year in its own path. Each edition is a separate dated promotion rather than one continuous ballot.

The 2026 window is August 21 through October 3, 2026. The 2025 edition ran from August 1 through October 4, 2025, so the program holds to a late-summer opening and an early-October close across both years with printed dates. A 2027 edition is the next expected cycle, though the paper has not announced one.

Two things the promotion listing does not carry matter to anyone planning a push. The Auburn Reporter has not printed the ballot's category list or its per-voter rules on the promotion listing; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. That gap is worth taking seriously: the number of categories, whether a supporter may vote daily, and any eligibility terms for nominated businesses all live on the ballot itself, not on the listing that dates the window.

One more dated fact belongs here because it shapes the calendar: the Auburn Reporter also runs quarterly sweepstakes on the same Second Street host, and those promotions sit between the ballot editions on the paper's promotion calendar. They are separate promotions, not parts of the ballot.

How a supporter votes on the Auburn ballot today

The literal mechanic is a public vote on a Second Street nomination-and-voting ballot. A supporter opens the Auburn Reporter's ballot address during the window, which runs from August 21 to October 3, 2026, and works through the categories shown on the page. Because the format combines nomination and voting, a category may let the supporter either nominate a business that is not yet listed or cast a vote for one that already appears.

Submission happens inside the promotion. Second Street ballots present their own prompts, and whatever verification or sign-in step applies is shown on the ballot at the moment of voting. The promotion listing does not state an account requirement, so the ballot page is the authority on that point.

Timing matters in a window this shape. An early-October close means the last week of September is the final stretch, and a business that wants its customers to take part needs to reach them before the window shuts. The per-voter routine, meaning how often one person may submit, is not printed on the listing, so read the rules block on the ballot before planning repeat visits.

For a supporter, the whole task reduces to three actions: open the ballot inside the window, choose the Auburn categories that matter, and submit each choice through the page's own prompts. Nothing about the format requires anything more than a browser and a few minutes per visit.

How this ballot sits beside its Washington neighbours

Best of Auburn 2026 is the small-market end of a Washington readers' choice family with six sibling programs on this site. Best of 425 covers the Bellevue and Eastside market, Cascade's Best covers the Cascades region, and Best of Clark County is the Columbian's county-wide ballot in the southwest corner of the state.

North of Auburn, the Everett Herald runs Best of Snohomish County, a county-scale program like Clark County's. Two broader media ballots round out the set: Best of Western Washington from KING 5, and Best of the Best Northwest Readers' Choice from the Seattle Medium.

The contrast with Auburn is scope and publisher. Every one of those siblings answers to a larger coverage area or a bigger media outlet, while Best of Auburn is one city, one paper, and a ballot whose audience is the paper's own readership. A business nominated in Auburn competes against its immediate local peers, not against a metro-wide field, which changes both the odds in any category and the kind of outreach that moves votes.

The shared thread is the format: all of these are public-vote readers' choice ballots where the audience decides, and all reward early, organized customer outreach over a last-day scramble.

Strengthening support for an Auburn nomination

In a single-city ballot, a business's reachable audience is its own customer base, and the Auburn Reporter's window gives a fixed stretch from August 21 to October 3, 2026 to reach it. The practical moves are the ones any nomination-and-voting ballot rewards: tell customers which category you are in, give them the ballot address, and ask before the final week rather than during it.

On outside help, the Auburn Reporter has not printed a rules text on the promotion listing, so a business planning anything beyond organic outreach should read the rules block on the live ballot first. The paper sets its own terms, and they govern. For a broader playbook that applies to this kind of ballot, see how to get more votes online, which covers outreach tactics that do not depend on any one platform's rules.

Keep the effort anchored to the window's real dates. Votes cast after October 3, 2026 do not count, and a push that lands too late wastes the audience you already have.