Wisconsin State Journal South Central Wisconsin's Best of the Best: How Voting Works & How to Win

What is South Central Wisconsin's Best of the Best and who runs it?

The Wisconsin State Journal, the newspaper whose web home is madison.com, publishes South Central Wisconsin's Best of the Best as its readers' choice competition for the south central part of the state. The program asks people who live in and around the region to name the businesses, organizations and local favorites they rate highest, then settles the outcomes with a public vote held on the Second Street balloting platform. For this market the platform's app sits at madisoncom.secondstreetapp.com, and the 2026 edition's address is the South-Central-Wisconsin-Best-of-2026-Voting page. Because the vertical is best-of in the business sense, the nominees are local enterprises rather than athletes, pets or entertainers, and a win functions as an endorsement straight from the paper's readership. The ballot sorts entries into sections a voter clicks through, which keeps a long spread of groups workable even on a small screen. Past that grouping the printed page stays lean: no essay, no panel, just the entries and the vote action beside them.

The essentials

Item	Detail
Organizer	Wisconsin State Journal
Publisher's web home	madison.com
Voting platform	Second Street
Ballot address	madisoncom.secondstreetapp.com/South-Central-Wisconsin-Best-of-2026-Voting/
Market	South Central Wisconsin, Wisconsin
Format	Public vote, best-of for local businesses
2026 nominations	May 6 to May 31
2026 voting	July 1 to July 26
Cadence	Annual, with 2025 and 2026 cycles

Which editions have run, and what dates govern the 2026 ballot?

Editions of the program ran in 2025 and 2026, spaced a year apart. Both cycles have sat on the same Second Street footing under the Wisconsin State Journal's banner, and the 2026 page prints its schedule openly rather than leaving supporters to guess at it.

Stage	Dates	Notes
Nominations	May 6 to May 31, 2026	readers put candidates forward
Voting	July 1 to July 26, 2026	open public ballot on Second Street
Confirmed cycles	2025 and 2026	watch the paper's announcements for what comes next

Gaps sit beside that timeline. Neither the full slate of categories nor any per-person vote allowance is printed next to the dates; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Mid-window round dates are likewise absent, so the July 1 opening and the July 26 close stand as the fixed points the page supplies.

Working with the schedule

For a nominee, the practical reading is that May belongs to getting onto the ballot and July belongs to turning out supporters. Anything a campaign wants to prepare, from customer emails to counter signage, is best built during June so it can fire on the opening day of voting.

How does a supporter vote on the Second Street ballot?

Everything happens on the ballot page itself. A supporter loads the South-Central-Wisconsin-Best-of-2026-Voting address under madisoncom.secondstreetapp.com, selects a group the ballot presents, and scrolls through the entries inside it. Every entry pairs with a vote action, and marking it logs the pick for that section. The selections are then submitted through the page so they stick. Several consequences follow from that layout. Any browser reaches the ballot, so a desktop evening and a phone moment cover identical ground. The group structure lets a supporter split the work across visits instead of doing it all in a rush. And the finer procedural points, whether credentials are requested beforehand, whether returns on later days are accepted, and how ties or disputes get handled, carry no printed answer, so the instructions displayed on the page govern while the window is open.

Reading the page before acting

Because the State Journal keeps the page spare, the safest habit is to read whatever text surrounds the vote button on the day a supporter arrives. Platform wording often shifts between cycles, and the ballot's own captions outrank any summary composed somewhere else. Supporters who want the widest view of how public ballots behave can compare this page with Eau Claire's Reader's Choice Awards, which follows the same broad best-of logic in a different market.

How does this contest compare with other Wisconsin readers' choice programs?

Wisconsin's readers' choice calendar is busy, and this site carries a page for each major market. Appleton's Best of the Valley, Green Bay's Best of the Bay, Janesville CommunityVotes, Milwaukee's Best of Milwaukee Readers' Choice and Best of Madison all run beside the State Journal's ballot. Each answers to a different local publisher, and each draws on its own city's loyalties. What separates South Central Wisconsin's Best of the Best from that pack is scope and stewardship. Instead of wearing a lone city's name, it speaks for the wider south central region, and it answers to a daily newspaper with an established madison.com readership. The flip side is that category depth and promotional muscle depend entirely on what the paper commits each summer, since the ballot page itself carries no pledge about either. For a nominee deciding where effort pays, the practical test is customer location. Businesses serving the south central region get the direct benefit from this ballot, while enterprises bound to a specific metro usually gain more from their own market's contest, where their customers are likelier to be reading and voting.

What can a nominee do to earn more support in the July window?

A nomination is only the start; converting it into a win depends on turnout between July 1 and July 26. The levers are ordinary ones: tell customers the ballot is live and hand them the exact address, post the appeal while attention is high in the opening days, and remind people that a vote takes moments on a phone. Because the ballot is grouped by section, a business with fans in several sections gains from spreading the word across all of them rather than pushing a lone entry. The State Journal publishes no guidance on outside voting assistance for this contest, so a campaign weighing paid help should read the posted rules and decide accordingly. Background that applies to any public ballot sits in the guide to getting more votes online, and the mechanics of purchased support for awards-style contests are outlined at buying award votes.