Best of Denver: How Voting Works & How to Win

Four Colorado ballots, one very different scale problem

Denver isn't Summit County, and Best of Denver isn't built for the same size of town as Best of Summit County or Best of the Boat in Steamboat Springs. Westword runs its readers-choice poll for a metro area with well over two million residents; the mountain-county programs serve towns where a few thousand engaged voters can visibly move a result. That gap in scale changes what a realistic campaign looks like before a single vote gets cast.

Then there's the vertical split. Colorado High School Athlete of the Week and Colorado High School Player of the Year are sport fan-votes tied to specific schools and seasons, not business readers-choice awards. A Denver restaurant owner searching for how to win a fan poll and a Denver restaurant owner searching for how to win Best of Denver are, in practice, looking at two entirely different mechanics run by entirely different organizers.

Sponsor, exact category count, and vote mechanics for the two mountain-county programs and the two sport polls aren't repeated in detail here; each has its own page. What matters for a Denver business is narrower: Best of Denver runs on westword.com, it's now in its 43rd year, and it isn't the same ballot as anything else in that table. See the Colorado hub for how all four fit into the state's wider fan-vote picture.

What a 43rd edition actually tells you

Forty-three. That's not a round marketing number, it's a count, and it means Westword has kept this ballot running long enough to put its first edition somewhere in the early-to-mid 1980s. A program doesn't survive four decades of Denver alt-weekly publishing by accident; it survives because enough readers keep showing up to vote every year.

That longevity matters more than it looks on paper. A one-year-old online poll and a 43-year-old readers-choice institution both technically let the public vote, but a business owner deciding how much marketing effort to put behind a nomination is making two very different bets. Westword's number says this ballot has outlived multiple ownership changes, a shift from print-only to online voting, and probably more than one redesign of the ballot page itself.

None of that means the current cycle behaves exactly like edition 20 or edition 35 did. It doesn't. What it does mean is that a "vote for us in Best of Denver" message lands differently in a market with this kind of track record than the identical message would in a brand-new poll with no history behind it.

The category list and vote cap aren't public here

Two things Westword hasn't published anywhere public: the actual list of 2026 categories, and any stated per-day or total vote cap. Guessing at either would do a Denver business more harm than good.

Guessing at these numbers would cost more than naming the gap

Westword's own ballot page, westword.com/best-of-denver-readers-choice-poll, is the only reliable source for which categories are open this cycle and how voting is limited, if it's limited at all. A category name invented here could send a campaign chasing a slot that doesn't exist this year, or one that got folded into a different section since the last edition.

A business that reads this table honestly walks away knowing exactly three things for certain, plus exactly what still needs a five-minute check on westword.com before any campaign copy goes out.

How the westword.com ballot works, mechanically

Voting for Best of Denver happens directly on Westword's own domain, not through a licensed third-party voting platform the way some regional readers-choice programs operate. That's a meaningful distinction: the alt-weekly controls its own ballot infrastructure, its own results reporting, and its own rules page, all under one roof.

Whether the current cycle uses a single combined ballot covering every category, or splits into separate category pages the way Summit County's program or other smaller readers-choice ballots sometimes do, is something Westword hasn't spelled out anywhere public. A campaign built around one specific link should verify that the link actually points at the live 2026 ballot page before it goes out to a single customer.

For the general mechanics behind any readers-choice or award-style push, from planning a send schedule to understanding what "voting" actually asks of a supporter's time, award-style vote campaigns covers ground that applies to a Best of Denver nomination as much as it does a smaller regional program. Westword's own published rules, not another site's terms, govern this ballot, so check is buying votes legal before any budget goes toward a push here.

Running a Denver-sized campaign instead of a Steamboat-sized one

LoDo, RiNo, Capitol Hill, Cherry Creek, Highlands, Five Points, Washington Park. That's seven Denver commercial districts off the top of any local's head, and it's not close to the full list. A restaurant in RiNo and a boutique in Cherry Creek, both nominated for Best of Denver, aren't competing inside a town small enough to canvas door to door in an afternoon, the way a Steamboat Springs business chasing Best of the Boat effectively can.

That scale cuts both ways. A Denver metro population well into the millions means more total potential voters than any mountain county could ever field, but it also means a single neighborhood's worth of loyal regulars is a much smaller slice of the total than the same regulars would represent in a smaller market. Real customer outreach still works here. It just needs more of it, sustained longer, to register against a metro-sized denominator.

What doesn't scale differently by market size is the basic honesty test. Sending real past customers a direct link to the live westword.com ballot page, in the correct category once that's confirmed, is legitimate outreach in Denver exactly the way it is in a mountain town. Claiming a "win" before Westword actually publishes one, or inventing a category that doesn't exist this cycle, causes the same damage at any market size. How online contest votes work covers that general playbook in more depth, and the Colorado contest hub rounds up the state's other readers-choice and fan-vote programs for anyone running more than one Colorado campaign this year.