Best of the West End: How Voting Works & How to Win

What Best of the West End is, and who publishes it

Best of the West End is the readers'-choice business ballot Forks Forum runs for the West End of Washington State, published in partnership with the Peninsula Daily News and Sequim Gazette. The ballot lives on the Second Street platform at forksforum.secondstreetapp.com/Best-of-the-West-End, the same kind of hosted balloting system many regional newspapers use for their own "best of" polls.

Forks Forum is the weekly paper behind the program, serving the city of Forks on the Olympic Peninsula. Best of the West End turns that local coverage into an annual business award: readers nominate businesses across a wide set of categories, then vote, and the organizer tallies the results on its own ballot page.

The 2026 ballot groups its categories under these section headings: Arts & Entertainment, Automotive, Community, Food & Drink, Health & Beauty, Home & Garden, People, Professional Services, Shopping, and Things To Do. That spread covers most of what a West End household or visitor might look for, from a favorite restaurant to a preferred contractor.

The dated record: two editions, and a July voting window

Two editions are confirmed for Best of the West End. The Forks Forum ran the first in 2025; the current ballot page marks its own round "The 2nd Annual Best of the West End," which identifies 2026 as the second edition without ambiguity about where the count stands.

2025's window comes from the Second Street platform itself: nominations and voting together ran June 9 through July 14, 2025, before that round closed. 2026 shifted later in the summer, and the Forks Forum's own coverage states the change plainly: "Best of the Best voting will begin July 13 and end at midnight July 26."

What that leaves open is the calendar step ahead of voting. Nothing on the ballot page or in the Forks Forum's published coverage fixes an exact 2026 nomination window separate from those July dates, and no eligibility rule beyond the one below appears anywhere; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

A two-year history is still a short one next to regional "best of" ballots that stretch back a decade. For a West End business weighing whether to take part, that means judging the program on what it has already shown, a functioning annual ballot with a named category structure, rather than on a long run of past winners.

How a West End supporter votes today

Forks Forum has published the vote rule outright: "Voters will be asked to register only one time in each county in order to cast their ballots and may cast one vote per day." That single sentence sets the mechanic for Best of the West End, register once, then return daily to keep backing the same nominees through the July 13 to July 26 window.

On the ballot itself, a supporter works through the category groups, Arts & Entertainment through Things To Do, and picks a business in each one that matters to them. Nothing requires a full sweep of every group in one sitting; the Second Street ballot holds a partial submission open to finish later.

Beyond the one-vote-per-day and one-registration-per-county rule, Forks Forum has not published a separate account-verification step, an age requirement, or a residency rule tied to the West End itself. A supporter outside Forks who wants to back a favorite business there is not obviously excluded by anything printed on the page.

How this ballot sits beside its Washington State neighbours

Best of the West End sits alongside several other reader-driven "best of" ballots across Washington State, each run by its own publisher with its own results. Best of 425 covers the Bellevue-Eastside market on the other side of the state, and Best of Western Washington runs at a much broader regional scale through a television station rather than a newspaper.

Best of Clark County and Best of Snohomish County both anchor to a single county the way Best of the West End anchors to its own coverage area, though neither shares a publisher, a platform, or a results page with the Forks Forum ballot. Cascade's Best and Best of the Best Northwest Readers' Choice round out the group, each with its own separate nomination and voting cycle.

None of these six ballots pool results with Best of the West End or with each other. A West End business that also qualifies for a neighboring ballot is running two separate campaigns with two separate rulebooks, not one combined effort. What sets the Forks Forum ballot apart is its scale, a two-edition program built around one weekly paper's own coverage area, rather than a multi-county or statewide readers' poll.

Building support for a West End nomination

Because Best of the West End resets every year, a nomination push starts the same way each cycle: get real West End customers to the forksforum.secondstreetapp.com ballot before July 26, and ask them to return since only one vote counts per person each day. Forks Forum's own rule, register once per county and vote once daily, rewards a business whose supporters come back repeatedly over the window rather than one that pushes for a single burst of activity.

Nothing on the Best of the West End page states Forks Forum's stance on outside help, paid promotion, or voting software one way or the other, so no claim about what the platform allows or blocks can be made from what is printed there. Buying votes online covers what outside support for a ballot like this typically involves, and is buying votes legal lays out the legal and policy questions worth reading before spending a marketing budget on any nomination push.