Best of Arkansas: How Voting Works & How to Win

One hundred-plus categories, one statewide ballot

More than 100 categories. That's the headline fact about Best of Arkansas, Arkansas Times' statewide readers-choice program built around Little Rock and, in the organizer's own framing, the rest of the state too. A visitor landing on this page might actually be hunting for a Friday-night football fan vote, or a narrow business-only ranking. Neither is what this is.

Best of Arkansas sits in a different lane from two other kinds of Arkansas program covered on this site. Arkansas Business Best of Biz narrows its scope to businesses specifically, by its own name. The Arkansas High School Player of the Year, Arkansas High School Athlete of the Week, and Arkansas High School Boys Basketball Player of the Week programs are sport fan-votes entirely, run for a different audience with different organizers. Best of Arkansas is none of these. It's a general readers-choice award spanning well over 100 categories, statewide.

Confirm which of these Arkansas programs actually matches a given nomination before building a campaign around it. A restaurant chasing a Best of Arkansas category badge and a sophomore hoping for a Player of the Year nod need entirely different messages, sent to entirely different audiences, on entirely different sites.

What a 100-plus-category ballot actually changes

A contest with four or five categories is easy to reason about. One with more than 100 is not. At that scale, a nominee's real competition isn't every business in Arkansas. It's the handful of other entries sharing its exact category, whatever that category turns out to be called on the live ballot.

Category precision matters more here than on a smaller local ballot. Nothing here spells out the full list of every category by name, so a business shouldn't assume its category is obvious from its industry alone. Confirming the exact, correctly spelled category on vote.arktimes.com is worth the five minutes it takes.

What's confirmed, and what to verify each cycle

Coverage runs Little Rock and statewide, in Arkansas Times' own framing. A total category count above 100 is confirmed. What isn't published: an exact vote cap, a fixed close date, or the full roster of category names. Rather than guess, treat vote.arktimes.com as the live authority for whatever the current cycle actually requires.

Naming that gap plainly beats guessing at a number and getting it wrong. A business planning a Best of Arkansas push should build its calendar around what vote.arktimes.com actually says this cycle, not a date remembered from a previous year.

vote.arktimes.com casts the ballot; arktimes.com does not

Two addresses, two jobs. vote.arktimes.com is where an actual vote gets cast, the reader poll mechanism named directly in Arkansas Times' own program description. arktimes.com, the alt-weekly's main site, is where Best of Arkansas lives as a subject, including a dedicated arktimes.com/best-of-arkansas page.

That split trips up more campaigns than it should. A social post or a group text reading "go vote for us on Arkansas Times," linking to arktimes.com, sends a supporter somewhere they can read about the program, not somewhere they can act on it. A real, counted vote needs a link to vote.arktimes.com specifically, not the magazine's homepage.

This two-domain structure shows up on plenty of alt-weekly and regional-magazine readers-choice programs, in other states with other organizers. What matters for a Best of Arkansas campaign specifically is simpler: check that any shared link actually resolves to vote.arktimes.com before it goes out to a single supporter. For the general mechanics behind a readers-choice push like this one, award-style vote campaign guidance covers ground that applies broadly, and contest vote campaign services covers the wider category this program falls under.

Little Rock anchor, statewide claim

Little Rock anchors this program in Arkansas Times' own coverage description. Statewide is the second half of that same description. Both are named directly. Neither comes with a published list of every city or region actually contributing votes.

A named anchor city paired with a broader statewide claim is worth taking at face value, rather than assuming it means even participation everywhere. A business in Little Rock is entering the program's home turf. A business somewhere else in Arkansas is entering a program that describes itself as statewide but hasn't published a breakdown of where its votes actually come from.

Neither situation is a reason to skip entering. It is a reason to set expectations honestly. A Little Rock business can likely lean on strong local reader familiarity with Arkansas Times. A business further from Central Arkansas may need to do more of its own work driving supporters to vote.arktimes.com directly, rather than counting on the publication's built-in reach to carry a nomination on its own.

Running a Best of Arkansas campaign without guessing at the rules

No published vote cap. No published close date. No fabricated one belongs on this page either, so here is what a business can actually do: point real customers at the correct vote.arktimes.com listing, under the correct one of 100-plus categories, and repeat that ask while the ballot stays open.

Fake accounts, bot traffic, or invented sponsorship claims put more at risk than they add, especially on a ballot run by a publication with decades of readership in the state and, presumably, some practice spotting manipulated results. Real outreach, an email to existing customers, a mention at checkout, a direct link shared where supporters will actually see it, does the job without that risk.

A vote-promotion service, ours included, can help a business reach people who already know it and would likely vote for it anyway, pointed at the right vote.arktimes.com page. It cannot guarantee a placement inside a 100-plus category statewide ballot decided by Arkansas readers. Read is buying votes legal before committing budget to any campaign, and see how online contest votes work for the general mechanics that apply here. The Arkansas contest hub lists the state's other active programs, sport and best-of alike, for anyone weighing more than one Arkansas nomination at once.