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

What the 2026 Best of Harrison ballot is and who runs it

Most West Virginia readers' choice ballots belong to statewide or river-valley publications. This one is narrower. Best of Harrison is the annual business ballot run by WV News, the news organization whose coverage centers on Clarksburg, West Virginia, and Harrison County in the North Central part of the state. The program name says the scope plainly: it honors favorite local businesses in the Harrison market, not the whole state.

The ballot itself lives on Second Street, the contest platform that hosts the majority of American newspaper readers' choice programs. WV News runs its contests through the dedicated address ncwvcontests.secondstreetapp.com, and the 2026 edition sits at /2026-Best-of-Harrison on that host. The platform classifies the program as a Ballot of the NominationAndVotingBallot type, which matters for supporters: the same page handles both nominating a business and voting for it.

The ballot's own published text is short and business-focused. It reads "VOTING NOW OPEN" during the live window and asks supporters to "Support your favorite local businesses by nominating them today!". That single sentence is the clearest statement of intent the program publishes: this is a community award for commerce, driven by public nomination and public vote.

The dated history of Best of Harrison editions

Best of Harrison is an annual program with a deep run of confirmed editions. The platform listing for ncwvcontests.secondstreetapp.com carries eight promotion rows for the program across 2020 through 2025, and the 2026 edition is listed in its own right on the current ballot address. Confirmed edition years therefore run from 2020 through 2026, seven running years in total. Earlier ballots have survived at addresses such as wvnews.secondstreetapp.com/Best-of-Harrison-2021 and the 2023 nomination round page, which is how the older editions stay traceable.

The 2026 window is the most precisely dated. The Second Street listing for the program shows it as a Ballot/NominationAndVotingBallot running from December 8, 2025 through January 31, 2026, and it now carries closed status. Across the program's history, windows have opened on a late-November or December date and closed at the end of January.

What supporters get at the end is dated too: the organizer's own pages state that winners will be announced in the Best of Harrison special section in February 2026.

What the program does not publish is just as fixed. WV News prints no category roster for this ballot and no per-supporter voting limit or eligibility text anywhere in the material this program uses; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The next expected edition is 2027, and its dates have not been printed.

How a supporter votes on the Best of Harrison ballot

The mechanic is the nomination-then-vote pattern that Second Street uses for NominationAndVotingBallot programs, and it starts before any voting happens at all. Because the same ballot carries both rounds, a business that is never nominated by supporters cannot appear in the voting round, which is why the ballot's own text pushes nomination first: "Support your favorite local businesses by nominating them today!".

A supporter's literal path looks like this. Open the ballot at ncwvcontests.secondstreetapp.com/2026-Best-of-Harrison while a window is open. Sign in with an email address, since Second Street counts actions against a signed-in supporter. Move through the categories shown, typing a business name into each or choosing it from the suggestions the form offers as text is entered. Submit the ballot. During the voting round, return to the same address and cast votes for the businesses already on the ballot.

The 2026 edition ran the whole sequence inside a single window from December 8, 2025 to January 31, 2026, rather than splitting nomination and voting onto separate dates. A supporter who arrives outside a live window sees the closed state, and the practical move is to wait for the next edition's page, expected in 2027.

Repeat-visit behavior is the part WV News leaves unstated. No published rule describes daily returns or a cap on votes per supporter, so a supporter planning multiple visits should take the rule from whatever the live form shows at sign-in.

How Best of Harrison sits beside its West Virginia neighbours

West Virginia is well supplied with public-vote ballots, and Best of Harrison is the county-scale entry among them. The programs it most often gets compared with are the ones on this site's own state page: Best of West Virginia, which runs statewide, and Best in the Tri-State, run by the Herald-Dispatch for the Huntington market. Both are larger in reach; neither is anchored to Harrison County.

Three more siblings cover other regions of the state on the same best-of vertical: The Dominion Post Readers' Choice in the Morgantown-area press, Best in the Valley in the Charleston market, and Best of the Ohio Valley in the Wheeling-area press. A sixth, the West Virginia HBA Parade of Homes, is a builders' ballot rather than a readers' choice program.

What separates Best of Harrison within that set is its publisher's account structure. WV News runs it through its own Second Street host, ncwvcontests.secondstreetapp.com, alongside a handful of other promotions, rather than through a shared statewide ballot. Its window is also on a winter schedule, closing at the end of January, and its results reach readers through a printed special section each February.

Strengthening support for a Best of Harrison nominee

Because this ballot combines nomination and voting in one form, a business's earliest supporters matter most in this program. A nominee that collects nominations in December enters the January voting round with an existing base, so the practical advice for the Harrison market is to start asking customers as soon as the window opens rather than waiting for the voting round alone.

On outside help, the organizer's published material is quiet: WV News prints no rule text about third-party support for this program. That silence is not permission, and any push for votes should stay within whatever the live ballot shows at sign-in. The general picture of what outside support involves, and the legal position on paying for votes in community ballots, is laid out on our legality page and in the award-specific overview at our award votes page.

The honest baseline for this program is a customer ask: email lists, counter signs and social posts pointing at the ballot address during the live window. Those methods cost nothing and never risk a nominee's standing.