Best of Teller: How Voting Works & How to Win

What is Best of Teller and who runs it?

Best of Teller is a people's-choice recognition program for Teller County, Colorado. The organizer is The Gazette (Colorado Springs), and the ballot sits on the newspaper's Second Street tenant at gazette.secondstreetapp.com, the same address that carries the publisher's other community promotions, among them The Colorado Springs Gazette's Voters Choice and Best of the Springs.

The vertical is classic best-of: readers weigh in on the local businesses and favorites they rate highest, and the nominees with the strongest public support finish ahead. Where large metro ballots sweep up whole cities, this program keeps its candidate pool inside a single county, which makes every category a genuinely local contest between neighbors.

Structurally, notice that the publisher runs several ballot brands side by side, so a Teller County nominee competes only within this program, never against entries from the Springs edition. The software vendor is shared across those brands, which is why the forms look and behave alike.

Everything a visitor needs in order to enter sits on the live ballot itself rather than in a separate rules document.

When has Best of Teller run, and which dates are firm?

Confirmed rounds of Best of Teller appeared in 2021, 2023, 2024 and 2025. The 2022 year is absent from that sequence, and no statement explains the gap, so read the list as the years the ballot demonstrably appeared rather than an unbroken streak. On the strength of those repeated years the program qualifies as an annual fixture, with 2025 the most recent round on file.

The 2025 round carries firm dates. Voting opened on March 3, 2025 and closed on April 30, 2025, placing the entire contest in spring.

Several details sit outside the public trail. The 2025 form lists no category slate and prints no per-supporter or eligibility text; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The 2021, 2023 and 2024 rounds left no day-level dates behind, so the spring placement rests on the 2025 ballot alone.

How does a supporter cast a vote in Best of Teller?

Backing a favorite is deliberately simple. During an open round, a supporter goes to the ballot address for the current year, in 2025 that was https://gazette.secondstreetapp.com/Best-of-Teller-2025/, and moves through the entry form Second Street renders. Each category presents its nominees; the supporter marks a choice and submits it, and the form confirms the tally on the spot.

The form itself announces which round an address serves. The 2025 page carries the title "Best of Teller 2025" at its head, followed by the plain invitation "Check it out now!", so a visitor arriving mid-season knows immediately that the window shown belongs to that year's edition and not to a stale copy of an earlier one.

No purchase, membership or newspaper subscription is involved. Because Best of Teller runs as a public vote, any reader who reaches the form can take part without paying anything.

Practical notes follow from the form rather than from published rules. Whatever identification the ballot requests, and however often it lets a visitor return, is enforced by the page at submission time. A supporter who plans to back several county favorites should simply complete a visit, submit, and let the form guide the pace of any return trip.

Once a round closes, attention shifts to the next year's form, which takes a fresh address on the same tenant rather than overwriting the old one.

How does Best of Teller compare with other Colorado ballots?

Colorado has a crowded best-of field, and Best of Teller occupies the smallest, most county-focused seat in it. The Gazette's own flagship program, Best of the Springs, serves the Colorado Springs metro and carries a far longer history: the paper's advertising materials describe that publication as chronicling readers' favorites "for more than three decades," and a Gazette anniversary piece states plainly that "Best of the Springs started in 1994."

The scale difference runs deeper than age. The advertising materials sum the flagship up as honoring favorite "people, places and things" across fields spanning arts and entertainment, city life and recreation, family and health, food and drink, services and professionals, and shopping, while the anniversary history describes a sprawling slate of honored businesses and organizations. Against that spread, a Teller County ballot is a compact affair by design.

The other neighbours run at city and regional scale. 5280 publishes Top of the Town for Denver, Westword runs Best of Denver, NOCO Style backs Best of NOCO in northern Colorado, Summit County has its own ballot at Best of Summit County, and Steamboat's Best of the Boat covers that resort community.

What separates the Teller edition is audience. Businesses in a smaller county rarely crack a metro list, so this ballot gives them a dedicated stage, backed by a publisher that already runs community referendums as a core advertising product. For a nominee weighing where to invest effort, the practical difference is competition density: fewer entrants per category than a metro-wide ballot, and an electorate drawn from a tighter radius.

How can a nominee build support during the Best of Teller window?

A spring window concentrates everything a nominee does, so outreach has to be ready before opening day rather than improvised mid-round. The 2025 form carried no printed policy on outside assistance, so any organized effort should stay inside what the live ballot allows.

Mobilizing the customers you already have is the straightforward play. Announce the nomination, hand people the ballot address directly, and ask plainly for their pick while the round is open. Reminders near the closing stretch matter, because a month passes quickly for busy households.

Services that supply additional votes exist for ballots of this shape, and the mechanics behind them are covered in the support tactics guide. Whatever route a campaign takes, no outcome in a people's-choice ballot is ever guaranteed, and the count on closing day is the arbiter.