The Dominion Post Readers' Choice: How Voting Works & How to Win

Where the Dominion Post Readers' Choice sits among West Virginia's five confirmed 'best of' ballots

Five. That's how many separate readers'-choice "best of" programs currently run somewhere in West Virginia, each backed by its own newspaper or magazine. The Dominion Post's Morgantown ballot is one of them, alongside Charleston's Gazette-Mail, the statewide WV Living Magazine program, Huntington's Herald-Dispatch, and Wheeling's Intelligencer. A business searching "best of" without a city attached could land on any of the five.

None of them share a ballot, a URL, or a category list with each other. That matters more than it sounds like it should, because a Morgantown restaurant that also has a location in Huntington genuinely has two separate campaigns to run, not one shared link posted twice.

Of the five, the Dominion Post's carries the thinnest public paper trail at the time of writing. The organizer, the URL, and confirmed 2026 activity are solid. A category list, a vote cap, and a fixed calendar simply haven't made it onto the page, unlike some of its statewide siblings. See the Best of WV guide or the Best in the Valley guide for programs where more of that detail is on record.

Why the Morgantown market makes this one worth tracking anyway

West Virginia University doesn't just sit in Morgantown. It sets the town's rhythm. A student population cycles in every August and largely clears out by summer, and that swing shapes which businesses compete hardest in a readers' choice ballot here. Restaurants, bars, and salons feel the sharpest gap between a packed fall Saturday and a quiet week in early August before classes resume.

That's a different competitive shape than a ballot built around a stable, non-university city. A downtown bar busy on a home football weekend is fighting for the same wallet a Star City salon fights for on an ordinary Tuesday, and a readers'-choice ballot run against that backdrop tends to reward whichever business stays visible across both kinds of weeks, not just the loud ones.

None of that changes the vote mechanics themselves. It does explain why a Morgantown business should think about timing a Readers' Choice push around the WVU academic calendar specifically, rather than a generic "vote now" schedule borrowed from a program in a different kind of city.

What's confirmed here, and what genuinely isn't

Three facts sit on solid ground: The Dominion Post runs this program, it lives at dominionpost.com/readerschoice/, and it's confirmed active for 2026. That's the entire record checked for this guide. No public category list, no named recent winners, and no vote totals sit alongside those three facts.

Guessing would cost a business more than the gap itself

A Morgantown business searching for how this ballot actually works deserves an honest answer over a borrowed category list from a different paper's program. Naming a category that isn't confirmed, or a close date that isn't published, would be worse than saying plainly that the live page is the only current source. Businesses that want specifics should check dominionpost.com/readerschoice/ directly before printing anything with a deadline on it.

A thin public record isn't unusual for a smaller regional paper's own readers' choice program. Statewide ballots like Best of WV tend to publish more structural detail simply because they run at a larger scale; a single-city program under one local paper doesn't always carry the same documentation, and that's worth saying plainly rather than papering over.

The mechanics on record, and the ones that need a live check

Annual cadence. One confirmed URL. Active status for 2026. That's the mechanical skeleton this guide can responsibly state. Whether nomination and voting run as separate steps, whether the ballot groups by category the way Best in the Valley does, or lists everything on one flat page the way Best of the Ohio Valley does, isn't something the confirmed record answers either way.

A business that has run a campaign on a different West Virginia readers' choice program shouldn't assume this one copies that structure. For general mechanics that apply across most award-style pushes like this one, see award-style vote campaigns; Morgantown restaurants and bars specifically may find the restaurant vote campaign guide useful for pacing outreach around a category this competitive.

Running a real Morgantown campaign around the WVU calendar

A home football Saturday moves more people through downtown Morgantown in an afternoon than most ordinary weeks manage on their own. A Readers' Choice push timed around one of those weekends reaches a denser, more distracted crowd than the same message sent on a quiet Tuesday in February.

The smarter play is the opposite of loud. A restaurant, bar, or salon that reminds its actual regulars, not strangers, to vote at dominionpost.com/readerschoice/ under the right category builds turnout that holds up past one busy weekend. Star City, Westover, Suncrest, Sabraton, and Cheat Lake businesses compete in the same pool as downtown Morgantown, so geography inside the metro area isn't the edge here; real, repeat customers are.

What a campaign can't do is invent a category The Dominion Post hasn't published, or move the close date earlier or later than whatever the live page says. How online contest votes work covers the general mechanics, and the legal question deserves a look at is buying votes legal before any budget goes toward a Morgantown campaign, or toward any of West Virginia's other four readers'-choice ballots.