WV News Best of Preston County: How Voting Works & How to Win

One WV News account, several county ballots running the same season

Type "WV News best of" into a search bar during the fall and more than one county ballot can come back. The same organization that runs the 2026 Best of Preston County ballot also runs a 2026 Best of Marion County ballot and a 2026 Best of Upshur County ballot on the identical Second Street account, all open in the same stretch of the calendar.

Preston County's own address is wvnews.secondstreetapp.com/2026-Best-of-Preston-County, open September 3 through October 20, 2026. Nominating and voting happen on that single listing rather than in two separate stages. None of the three county ballots share a tally; a strong showing on Preston County's page carries no weight on Marion County's or Upshur County's own results.

Why checking the exact Preston County address is worth the extra step

WV News is headquartered in Clarksburg, West Virginia, running county-specific ballots for multiple counties from one place. A supporter who bookmarks a link from last year, or who lands on a different county's page by mistake, is not voting for Preston County at all. Checking the URL itself, not just the page's general look, is what actually confirms the right ballot.

The overlap in timing makes the mix-up easier than it might sound. WV News' Marion County ballot runs August 21 through October 2, 2026, and its Upshur County ballot runs July 8 through September 22, 2026, both windows sitting at least partly inside the same calendar stretch as Preston County's own September 3 through October 20 run. A supporter arriving from a shared link or an old bookmark during that overlap has three active WV News county ballots to potentially land on instead of one.

Preston County's own facts: three confirmed editions, longer than most

Three straight confirmed years sets Preston County apart from a WV News county ballot with only a single confirmed edition or a gap year in its history. Even so, the ballot page lists no category roster and no per-supporter limit; confirm on the live ballot each cycle before assuming either exists.

Three separate web addresses trace that three-year run: the current 2026-Best-of-Preston-County listing, a 2025-Best-of-Preston-County address from the prior cycle, and an older, undated Best-of-Preston-County address predating both. Neither of the two older addresses is where the live 2026 voting window is actually running today, and a search that surfaces one of them first is pointing to the past, not the present.

A county name in the address, a company address somewhere else entirely

Nothing published stretches Preston County's ballot past the county line, and nothing shrinks it to a single town inside the county either. The name printed on the listing, Preston County, is the actual scope; a supporter should not read in a wider or narrower boundary that the page itself never drew.

Clarksburg enters the picture only as WV News' corporate address, the place the company itself operates from while running ballots for several different West Virginia counties at once. It says nothing about who is eligible to be nominated or to vote inside Preston County's own listing, and it is not, on its own, a Preston County place name at all.

A Preston County business reading its own eligibility should look at what the Preston County ballot itself says, not at where WV News happens to keep its offices. The two facts, a company's corporate address and a ballot's own coverage area, answer entirely different questions, and conflating them is an easy way to misjudge who actually qualifies to be nominated here.

A three-year run, still without a fixed calendar past October 20

Three straight editions, 2024 through 2026, is a longer confirmed run than either of WV News' other current county ballots can currently show, yet nothing published fixes a date for a fourth. The window that is actually locked in runs September 3 through October 20, 2026, and that is the stretch a Preston County business can plan around today.

What moves a combined nomination-and-voting ballot like this one is ordinary, repeated attention from people with a real reason to visit wvnews.secondstreetapp.com, not a spike engineered to look bigger than it is, which matters even more here given two other WV News county ballots are drawing the same kind of attention this same season. Where that kind of push turns risky is covered at is buying votes legal. How one gets organized for a ballot built this way is covered at buying votes online, and award-vote strategy lines up with the readers'-choice shape Preston County shares with WV News' sister ballots.