Best of the Springs: How Voting Works & How to Win

Five Colorado ballots, one very different results format

thebestofthesprings.com. That's the entire program in one line: the Colorado Springs Gazette runs its own readers-choice ballot on its own domain, the same way Best of Denver runs on westword.com. What's different is where the story ends. Best of Denver and Top of the Town both settle in a digital or in-person format tied to their own sites. Best of the Springs settles in a print book.

That single fact reshapes how a Colorado Springs business should think about the program. There's no leaderboard to refresh, no live count to screenshot, and no results page described anywhere checked for this guide. The book itself, published annually, is the record.

Four sponsors, three formats, one state. A business running more than one of these campaigns in the same year isn't running one playbook four times; it's running four different ones. See the Colorado contests directory for what else is currently active statewide.

What a closed 2026 ballot means for a Springs business checking in today

Closed doesn't mean the program disappeared. It means the 2026 window for casting a vote at thebestofthesprings.com has already run its course by the time this guide was checked. A search landing here mid-cycle, months after voting closed, is common. Readers-choice ballots don't run all year, and a Colorado Springs business doing due diligence after the fact still needs a straight answer, not a page written as though voting were live right now.

What actually happens between cycles

Two things, based on what's confirmed. First, the Gazette compiles that year's results into the print book, a process that takes real production time and doesn't happen the same week voting closes. Second, at some point the Gazette opens nominations for the following year, though the exact month isn't published anywhere checked for this guide. A business assuming the same calendar window repeats every year is guessing.

The safer habit: bookmark thebestofthesprings.com itself, not a specific vote URL, and check back periodically rather than betting on a remembered date from a prior cycle. That's the same advice that applies to Best of Denver, where Westword hasn't published this cycle's specific dates either.

What's confirmed about Best of the Springs, and what genuinely isn't

Four facts hold up: the sponsor, the domain, the annual cadence, and the fact that 2026 voting has already closed. Everything past that thins out fast. No category list. No published vote cap. No specific nomination or close date for any cycle. No description of whether an account or email address is needed to cast a vote.

Why naming the gap beats guessing at it

A business owner searching for exactly how Best of the Springs works deserves an honest answer over an invented one. Padding this guide with a plausible-sounding category list, Food and Beverage, Retail, Services, the sort most readers-choice programs run, would read as authoritative right up until it turned out wrong for this specific program. It isn't stated here, so it isn't claimed here.

That's a shorter list than a business might expect from a program with its own dedicated domain. Short and accurate still beats long and invented.

Running on a different clock than a live web ballot

A campaign built around Colorado's SI-run sports polls gets a running number to react to. The Colorado Baseball Player of the Week widget shows a live count while the poll is open, so a coach or parent can tell by Wednesday whether Friday's push needs to be bigger. Best of the Springs offers nothing like that. Once a vote is cast on thebestofthesprings.com, there's no visible tally to check back against, at least not in anything confirmed for this guide.

That changes what "campaign" even means here. Reacting to a live number isn't an option, so front-loading outreach while a cycle is actually open matters more than pacing a push around a visible gap late in the window. A message asking real customers to vote has to go out early and get repeated, because nothing tells anyone whether it worked until the print book comes out.

Award-style vote campaign support built for readers-choice programs generally still applies here, structured outreach that reaches a business's own customer base rather than manufactured traffic, but the lack of a live counter means there's no mid-cycle signal to optimize against. What worked gets judged after the fact, against whatever the print book eventually says.

The wider Springs, not just downtown

"The Springs" is what this program's own domain calls the city, and that nickname covers more ground than the postcard downtown blocks near the Broadmoor. Old Colorado City sits to the west; the Powers corridor and Briargate stretch east and north; the Old North End's older housing stock sits closer to downtown; Security-Widefield lies further south toward El Paso County's smaller towns. Manitou Springs sits just outside city limits but close enough that its business community reads local coverage the same way a Colorado Springs business does.

Colorado Springs is the state's second-largest city: well behind Denver's metro population, but nowhere near small-town scale either. A Best of the Springs campaign sits between the two extremes on this list, bigger in raw competitor count than Top of the Town's Denver-only field, yet still a single-city market where a business's actual regulars can move a result in a way that's harder to pull off across a sprawling metro.

What counts as legitimate outreach doesn't change with market size. Once a cycle reopens, sending real past customers a direct link to the live thebestofthesprings.com ballot, and repeating that ask as the window runs, is the same honest playbook that works in Denver or in a mountain town a tenth the size. Fabricated accounts or scripted traffic risk more than a stripped vote in a community where local business owners read the same paper running the award. Is buying votes legal covers the general framework before any budget goes toward a push here, and how online contest votes work walks through mechanics that apply whether a result lands on a webpage or, like this one, in a book.