Best of Alaska: How Voting Works & How to Win

A statewide ballot in a state where nothing is really statewide

Anchorage to Fairbanks is a six-hour drive. Ketchikan has no road connection to either city at all; you fly or take the ferry. Best of Alaska asks all of it to vote on the same ballot anyway. Anchorage Daily News, Alaska's largest daily newspaper, runs the program at adnbestofalaska.com, taking public nominations across categories like restaurants, services, outdoor, and retail before opening a community vote on whoever clears that first round.

That two-stage design is the whole story here. Nominations first. Voting second. Skip the nomination window and a business never reaches the ballot, no matter how loyal its customers are once voting opens.

One statewide ballot, five regional look-alikes

Alaska Business Magazine runs its own B2B readers' vote. The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner has a separate Readers' Choice for the Interior. Juneau has Best of Juneau. The Kenai Peninsula and the Mat-Su Valley each run regional ballots too. So when a Fairbanks shop owner hears "Best of Alaska," they may actually be thinking of the wrong contest, the Daily News-Miner's, not the Anchorage Daily News version this page covers.

Why does this matter for a campaign? Because a customer told simply to "vote for us on Best of Alaska" without a link can land on the wrong site entirely. Anchorage, Fairbanks, Juneau, Wasilla, Palmer, Kenai, Soldotna, Ketchikan, Sitka, and Kodiak each have distinct business communities, and several of those cities have two competing best-of programs running in the same season.

For the rest of what's running in the state, the Alaska contest hub tracks the other live programs, including the Alaska High School Athlete of the Week ballot and the Alaska High School Player of the Year vote.

Nomination window, then voting window, nothing else

Best of Alaska doesn't publish fixed calendar dates that hold from year to year. So a business planning a launch date, printing QR cards, or booking ad space needs the live adnbestofalaska.com page open in a tab, not last year's screenshot.

Miss the nomination stage and there's no appeal, no late entry, no side door into the vote. That single fact should anchor every Best of Alaska calendar a business builds. For the category-agnostic version of this planning problem, the getting votes for an online contest guide and the winning online competitions guide both cover the calendar discipline in more depth.

Turning a scattered audience into a Best of Alaska turnout

A single statewide push doesn't work well here, and the geography explains why. So the better approach for a business with locations or customers across multiple regions: split messaging by city while keeping the vote instruction (award name, category, exact business name, link) identical everywhere.

A short cadence beats one big announcement: a message when nominations open, one when voting starts, and a tighter final reminder once the close date is confirmed on the live ballot (it isn't fixed here or anywhere in advance). Receipt inserts, staff scripts at checkout, and a QR code on a counter all do more in Alaska's spread-out communities than a single social post aimed at "everyone in the state."

None of that touches the outcome, though. Category size, competing nominees, and the organizer's own narrowing round all sit outside any business's control, and outside any promotion service's control too. Businesses building the reminder side of a campaign can start from the email outreach guide or the getting people to vote for you guide, both written for exactly this kind of turnout problem, not a bot race.

Reading and using Best of Alaska results honestly

This page names no current-year winner on purpose. Old PDFs, screenshotted results, and reseller pages circulate long after a given year's ballot closes, and none of them substitute for the organizer's own record. Anchorage Daily News publishes official results, plus prior-year archives, on Issuu. That is the only citation worth using.

Precise marketing beats broad marketing every time. "Best of Alaska 2026 winner, Outdoor Retail" holds up under scrutiny. "Alaska's best" does not, and it invites exactly the kind of pushback a small business community notices fast. Before results post, "nominated" and "vote for us" are the honest words to use, not "winner."

A promotion service can help with reminders, landing pages, and reaching real supporters who already know the business. What it cannot do, and what no honest provider should claim, is guarantee where an organizer-run, community-voted ballot lands. For general questions on how paid vote support fits into a real campaign, see how real vote campaigns work, the broader award voting guide, or the buy votes online overview and the is buying votes legal breakdown before committing budget.