Best of Aspen & Snowmass: How Voting Works & How to Win

Two Colorado resort towns, one Second Street ballot: who runs Best of Aspen & Snowmass

The Aspen Times, the newspaper covering Aspen and Snowmass Village, Colorado, organizes Best of Aspen & Snowmass and runs its ballot on Second Street's platform, at aspentimes.secondstreetapp.com. The program puts local businesses and individual nominees on the same ballot, a wider net than a business-only readers' poll casts.

Second Street's balloting software is what actually runs the vote: The Aspen Times' own address for this program is aspentimes.secondstreetapp.com, specific to the Aspen and Snowmass Village market rather than a generic platform front door. A supporter typing that address directly reaches the same ballot The Aspen Times itself links to.

Unlike a ballot that separates a "best businesses" track from a "best people" track, Best of Aspen & Snowmass keeps both in the same nomination-to-vote pipeline: businesses and individual nominees share one ballot rather than two separate ones.

Snowmass Village sits beside Aspen, and The Aspen Times treats the pair as one readers'-choice market rather than running two separate ballots. That single-market approach is the frame every other fact on this page sits inside.

Five editions, two rounds a cycle: the confirmed history behind Best of Aspen & Snowmass

Confirmed editions of Best of Aspen & Snowmass run 2019, 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026, five in all. The 2026 cycle carries two separate voting windows: Round 1 ran August 26 through September 1, and Round 2 runs September 30 through October 6, with the field narrowed between the two.

Confirmed editions jump from 2019 straight to an unbroken run from 2023 through 2026. What's published never explains the years in between, so the four straight years since 2023 are treated here as the confirmed stretch, without guessing at why a local newspaper contest might have paused in the interim.

The Aspen Times has never printed a ballot-category list or a per-voter cap for either Best of Aspen & Snowmass round; confirm on the live ballot each cycle, since the two-round format gives that detail two separate chances to change between Round 1 and Round 2.

For anyone reading this in autumn 2026, only one of those stages is live: Round 2 voting, running through October 6. Round 1 and the nomination stage before it are already closed for this cycle, which is why the confirmed dates above describe a completed step rather than one still open to new entries.

How a supporter takes part today, from nomination to Round 2

Best of Aspen & Snowmass runs in stages, and knowing which stage is live matters more than any other single fact on this page. A nomination round opens first: Aspen and Snowmass Village readers write in the businesses and people they want considered, and only the top 10 entries in each field advance to the official vote. The Aspen Times treats that opening stage as a real filter, not a formality, since it decides which names actually reach voters next.

From there, voting itself runs in two rounds, and only the second one is live now. A supporter opens aspentimes.secondstreetapp.com, finds the name they back among whoever Round 1 already carried forward, and casts a vote in each category that interests them, the same straightforward action whether this is someone's first year following Best of Aspen & Snowmass or their sixth.

The same mechanic applies whether a supporter is backing a business or an individual nominee: find the name on aspentimes.secondstreetapp.com and cast a vote. Best of Aspen & Snowmass does not publish a separate process for either of the two nominee types the ballot allows.

Where Best of Aspen & Snowmass sits among Colorado's other best-of ballots

The Aspen Times is not the only Colorado publisher running a readers'-choice ballot, and Best of Aspen & Snowmass answers to nobody outside its own two-town market.

None of those six share a judging pool or a results page with Best of Aspen & Snowmass, and a strong Aspen and Snowmass Village nomination total buys nothing toward any of the other six. A business that also draws visitors passing through Denver or Summit County is, in the eyes of these programs, running separate campaigns under separate rules, not one push that happens to touch several mountain towns.

Mountain-resort markets like Aspen and Snowmass Village run at a different scale than a metro market like Denver, and The Aspen Times' ballot reflects that: it names a two-town readers' base rather than a metro-wide one. That distinction is part of why Best of Aspen & Snowmass and a Denver-based ballot like Best of Denver rarely draw the same nominees in the first place.

What actually separates Best of Aspen & Snowmass from that list is the two-round voting structure printed on its own page, a nomination stage followed by a separate Round 1 and Round 2 vote. A business chasing recognition in more than one of these seven markets is running that many separate campaigns, each bound by whatever process its own organizer has posted.

Strengthening support inside Best of Aspen & Snowmass

Best of Aspen & Snowmass runs entirely through aspentimes.secondstreetapp.com, so any push to support a nominee has to work inside that Second Street ballot, not around it. The confirmed page does not print a policy on outside vote-support services for either round, which leaves The Aspen Times' own rules, whatever they turn out to be once posted, as the actual authority on the question.

What is clear from the two-round structure itself is timing: a push that only starts once Round 2 opens has already missed whatever the nomination round decided. Real supporters, asked more than once across both rounds rather than only near a deadline, are what a two-stage ballot like this one rewards. Building real momentum for an online ballot covers that approach in more detail, and buying contest votes explains what outside help typically involves for a readers'-choice format like this one.