WV News River Cities Best of the Best: How Voting Works & How to Win

A region, not a county: what River Cities Best of the Best names

2025 River Cities Best of the Best takes its title from a region rather than a single named county, hosted at wvnews.secondstreetapp.com. WV News itself is witnessed operating out of Clarksburg, West Virginia. Nothing published breaks that regional name down into a specific list of towns or counties it covers.

Three editions are confirmed: 2023, 2024 and 2025. The most recent ran as a single combined nomination-and-voting window, opening November 18, 2024 and closing January 8, 2025. Past that stretch, WV News keeps quiet on how many judging categories exist and on whether any cap limits repeat voting from the same supporter.

The organizer keeps the category count and the per-voter rule off the page; confirm on the live ballot each cycle, since a three-edition history is not yet long enough to promise the same shape carries forward into a fourth.

Set against six differently named West Virginia ballots

West Virginia already has six other confirmed best-of programs built out, and every one of them uses either a single city or the whole state in its name rather than a multi-city region. River Cities Best of the Best stands apart on that point alone, before getting into who actually runs each one.

Why the region name is worth flagging

A regional name without a published town list leaves more room for a reader to wonder who exactly counts. None of the six programs above tallies toward this ballot or shares a judging panel with it, so the naming resemblance between "Best in the Tri-State" and "River Cities" is coincidental rather than a sign the two overlap; each keeps its own separate scoreboard under its own publisher.

Reading three editions honestly against a longer WV News lineup

2023, 2024, 2025: three confirmed editions is not a small number for a repeating readers'-choice ballot, but it is also not the decade-plus history that would let a business call River Cities Best of the Best a long-settled fixture. It reads as a genuinely repeating program, just a newer one, still building the kind of multi-year pattern that would make a fourth or fifth edition unremarkable rather than notable.

That distinction matters when a business decides how much history to cite while pitching the ballot to customers. Three straight years is accurate and still worth mentioning; implying a decade of past results is not, and a customer who checks the dates directly would catch the gap. Treating a three-year pattern as proof of a fourth edition is also a stretch worth avoiding out loud, even though a fourth looks likely given the pattern so far.

Turnout planning for a single combined window

With nomination and voting folded into one continuous stretch rather than split into separate stages, a business gets one deadline to plan around, not two. Reaching supporters early in that window and again as it nears its close covers more ground than a single attempt made right before the cutoff.

Real people, asked more than once across the roughly seven-week span between November 18 and January 8, are what actually move a ballot like this, whether it is on its third edition or its thirtieth. Buying fake clicks or bot traffic risks the entire entry, and a program still building its confirmed history has less cushion to absorb that kind of setback than an older one might. Is buying votes legal lays out where that line sits before any budget goes toward a River Cities push, award-vote campaign planning is built around exactly this single-window ballot shape, and buying votes online covers the outside-support options available once a new cycle actually opens.