Best of Smith Mountain Lake: How Voting Works & How to Win

Three confirmed rounds, and a gap since that's worth stating plainly

Best of Smith Mountain Lake is a business readers'-choice ballot for the Smith Mountain Lake area, published by The Roanoke Times through the Second Street voting platform at roanoke.secondstreetapp.com. The lake sits in southwestern Virginia, southeast of Roanoke, where the newspaper is based, with the listing's own address placing it in nearby Hardy.

Three rounds are confirmed: 2019, 2020, and 2021. The most fully documented of the three set voting from August 1 through October 21, capped at once per person per day, split across these categories: Business, Food & Drink, and Lifestyle & Activities. Nothing available here names a round after 2021, a five-year gap that's worth naming rather than papering over with an assumed "annual" label.

Confirm on the live ballot each cycle whether any of that structure, or the program itself, is still active before building a campaign around it.

Set against Virginia's other public-vote programs, this one covers the least ground

Virginia carries several very differently shaped "best of" and awards ballots, and Smith Mountain Lake's is the narrowest by geography. Comparing footprints side by side shows why a strong showing here means something different than a strong showing on a statewide program.

What the footprint difference actually means for a nominee

None of those six programs share a nominee pool or a tally with Smith Mountain Lake's ballot, and placing well on one says nothing about how a business would do on another. A lake-area business weighing whether to also chase a Roanoke-region program, or one further east toward Charlottesville, is looking at entirely separate contests with separate publishers, not overlapping slices of one larger event.

Smith Mountain Lake's ballot, read against what the listing itself confirms

Smith Mountain Lake itself isn't a single incorporated town, and the program's own listing traces back to a Hardy, Virginia address on the lake's edge, while The Roanoke Times, the publisher running the ballot, is based in Roanoke to the southwest.

That gap between where the publisher sits and where the lake itself is matters for a nominee: a business doesn't need to sit inside Roanoke's own city limits to enter, since the ballot's subject is the lake area rather than the newspaper's home city. Nothing published narrows that reach any further than "Smith Mountain Lake" itself, so a lake-area business has as much claim to entering as any other.

What's confirmed stays limited to three rounds, 2019 through 2021, the last documented one running August 1 through October 21 with a once-a-day cap across the same categories: Business, Food & Drink, and Lifestyle & Activities. None of that tells a nominee where the lake's own boundary sits; only roanoke.secondstreetapp.com would, if a current round exists to check.

Approaching a program with an unconfirmed current status

A five-year gap since the last confirmed round changes the calculus for a Smith Mountain Lake business more than it would for a ballot that's clearly running every year. The first real step isn't campaign planning at all; it's checking roanoke.secondstreetapp.com to see whether a live round exists this cycle before asking a single customer to click anything.

If a round is live, the same basic principle applies here as anywhere else: actual lake visitors and regulars, asked more than once across whatever window the page confirms, move a tally further than a single social post ever will. Second Street, like most polling platforms newspapers rely on, watches for irregular voting patterns, so leaning on real relationships rather than shortcuts protects a business's standing if the program does return.

Is buying votes legal lays out where a turnout push crosses into risk, worth reading before spending anything toward a program whose current status isn't even confirmed yet. Buying votes online walks through how paid promotion actually functions once a lake business finds a live round, and award-vote campaign planning becomes useful the moment Smith Mountain Lake's ballot is confirmed to be running again.