Best of the Pines (The Pilot): How Voting Works & How to Win

Eight years running: the longest confirmed history in this comparison

2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026, eight straight years without a single gap. Best of the Pines belongs to The Pilot Promotions, the marketing team behind The Pilot, the newspaper serving Southern Pines, North Carolina, and it runs on the Second Street ballot system at pilot.secondstreetapp.com.

For 2026, names go in starting June 1 and close June 21, the public vote then opens July 8 and runs through July 28. Once July 28 passes the trail goes cold on specifics: nothing names which categories exist, nothing sets a ceiling on votes per person, and nothing spells out a household limit.

Read that gap for what it is, not what it implies. Eight straight years of continuity is a real pattern, but it does not answer whether a category roster or a voting ceiling exists behind the scenes; confirm on the live ballot each cycle for either one.

A community newspaper's own ballot, not a syndicated network

CommunityVotes and similar networks run one shared platform inside many unrelated cities at once. Best of the Pines works the opposite way, tied to a single community newspaper backing one ballot for one town. Elsewhere in North Carolina, readers'-choice programs split roughly between these two setups.

Not one of those five posts a joint leaderboard with Best of the Pines, pulls from the same judging pool, or folds a Southern Pines result into its own tally. A strong Southern Pines turnout leaves a business's position on any of the other five untouched, exactly as a Charlotte or Chowan County win leaves it untouched here.

What eight unbroken years actually tells a business today

A ballot that has fired every single June since 2019 is not likely to vanish without notice, yet nothing published says what comes right after July 28 in any specific year. pilot.secondstreetapp.com/Best-of-the-Pines-2026 stays the one place to look, checked fresh each cycle instead of borrowed from how last year's calendar happened to fall.

A community's own paper, without borrowed county detail

Southern Pines is the only place the organizer's own listing ties to this ballot, and the page draws nothing wider around it. No county gets named, no neighboring town gets listed, and nothing spells out which readers actually count toward a nomination.

The Pilot Promotions' account on Second Street carries other campaigns besides this one, but none of them shares Best of the Pines' own ballot, and none folds into what this page describes.

A business should take Southern Pines at face value, the way The Pilot's own listing puts it. Stretching that reach further is a call the business makes on its own, not something the organizer has actually printed.

Backing a business across eight years of the same annual rhythm

Eight straight editions leave a business with an actual pattern to work from: names go in during early June, the public vote follows in mid-to-late July, and the whole cycle wraps before summer's out. That rhythm alone is worth more planning value than most ballots this young offer, even with no published category roster or supporter limit to round it out.

What moves a total here is the same as anywhere else, real people, asked more than once across both the nomination stretch and the voting stretch. Fake or automated activity puts an entry at risk no matter how many editions a program has behind it, and eight years of history buys a business no extra cover if its own tally looks artificially built up.

Winning stays out of a nominee's hands no matter how strong the nomination looks; The Pilot Promotions settles that once its own voting wraps up. is buying votes legal is worth reading before any real money goes toward chasing a ninth edition, since it draws the boundary a campaign should not cross. For what outside support commonly involves on a ballot shaped like this one, buying votes online is the place to start, and award-vote campaign planning maps a strategy built specifically around this readers'-choice format.