Best Of The West (Boulder County): How Voting Works & How to Win

What Best of the West is and who runs it

Best of the West is the readers poll of Yellow Scene Magazine, a Colorado publication serving Boulder County, which the magazine and its readers call BOCO. This is a best-of style recognition program, and instead of a jury or an editor's pick, the winners are decided entirely by the community, with readers naming their favorites themselves.

The magazine is explicit about what makes its ballot unusual. Yellow Scene Magazine describes itself as BOCO's only true Readers Poll and the only open poll to vote for community favorites. There are no drop-down menus. YS is the only write-in ballot for readers to tell the magazine who's best. That wording matters for anyone comparing Colorado readers polls: most best-of ballots hand you a fixed list of nominees to click through, while this one asks you to type the name of the business, person or place you want recognized.

The ballot is served from yellowscene.com itself, with no outside voting service in between. The voting page lives at yellowscene.com/best-of-the-west/, and the magazine also uses that page to distribute promotional collateral each cycle so local businesses can tell their customers to write their name in.

The dated facts: which editions are confirmed

The confirmed edition years for Best of the West are 2023, 2025 and 2026. The 2025 cycle was described by the magazine itself as the Annual Best of the West, and that edition closed with polls closing January 17th, 2025. The 2026 Best of the West Poll is now open, which makes it the live edition at the time of the most recent page text.

The 2023 cycle carries the clearest window on file: polling ran with winners to be announced in February 2023, and the timing evidence for that cycle places the window across February, from the first of the month to the twenty-eighth. Exact open and close dates for the 2026 cycle are not printed on the page held here; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

The program's history reaches further back than the confirmed edition list. According to the magazine's own coverage, Boulder joined Best of the West in 2008, which the magazine noted in a piece about the ones it loves most. That makes the Boulder County edition nearly two decades old as a publication tradition, even though the years a page confirms directly are 2023, 2025 and 2026.

The organizer leaves two things off the ballot page: the category roster and any rules text such as a per-supporter limit or eligibility terms; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The write-in format means the live form is the only complete picture of what the current cycle asks for.

How a supporter votes today

Voting in Best of the West is a typing exercise, not a clicking exercise. Because Yellow Scene Magazine runs the only write-in ballot in BOCO, a supporter opens the ballot page, finds the fields for the current cycle, and enters the name of each community favorite by hand. There are no drop-down menus to narrow the choices and no pre-built nominee list to select from, which is exactly the openness the magazine advertises.

The practical consequence is that name accuracy carries the vote. If a customer means to write in a specific Boulder County business but types a shortened or misspelled version, the ballot entry may not match what the business promotes. This is why the magazine publishes promotional collateral each cycle: businesses use it to tell everyone to write their name in, in the exact form they want it counted.

The current status is straightforward: the 2026 Best of the West Poll is open. A supporter who arrives at the ballot page today can participate in the live cycle. Earlier editions behave differently once they close, as the 2025 edition did when polls closed January 17th, 2025, and the page marks those cycles as closed rather than accepting entries.

After submission, the process ends with the magazine's announcement. The 2023 cycle set the pattern, with winners to be announced in February once polling wrapped. Whether the 2026 cycle follows the same announcement rhythm is not printed on the page held here, so the live page and the magazine's coverage are the places to watch for results.

How this ballot sits beside its Colorado neighbours

Colorado has a crowded best-of field, and Best of the West occupies a specific corner of it. Where Best of Denver from Westword covers the metro's largest city and Top of the Town from 5280 speaks to that magazine's readership, Yellow Scene Magazine's poll is built around Boulder County alone. The magazine's own framing, BOCO's only true Readers Poll, is a claim about that county, not about the state.

The other Colorado programs on this site answer to different publishers and different geographies: Best of NOCO to the north, Best of the Springs from the Gazette in the south, Best of Summit County in the mountains, and Best of the Boat in Steamboat. Each runs under its own publisher, every one with a separate ballot and a separate calendar, so a win in one says nothing about another.

What separates Best of the West within that field is the write-in mechanic. The magazine states plainly that there are no drop-down menus and that YS is the only write-in ballot for its readers. A supporter filling out this Boulder County ballot is doing something different from a supporter clicking a nominee list elsewhere: they are supplying the nominee themselves.

For a business owner, that difference shapes strategy. In a click-through poll, being on the nominee list is the hurdle; in a write-in poll, name recall and spelling are the hurdles, which is why the magazine's promotional collateral each cycle tells customers exactly what to type.

Strengthening support in a write-in readers poll

A write-in ballot rewards a different kind of campaign than a click-through one. Since Best of the West has no drop-down menus, every vote depends on a supporter remembering a business name and typing it correctly into the live form. The magazine itself shows the way: it publishes promotional collateral each cycle so businesses can tell everyone to write their name in. That is the organizer's own recommended play, and it works because it removes the two failure points of a write-in ballot, recall and spelling.

The magazine has not published rules about outside help, vote solicitation or any per-supporter limit on the page held here, so a business planning a push should read the live ballot page for the 2026 cycle before doing anything beyond ordinary promotion. What is certain is the format: an open poll where the count of written-in names decides the winners, and where the 2025 edition closed January 17th, 2025, showing that each cycle has a hard deadline.

For readers weighing paid support on public ballots generally, the honest framing is that every organizer sets its own terms, and this organizer's terms are not printed in advance. General background on strengthening support across public votes is in our votes guide, and the service-side details sit on buy award votes. No vote service of any kind can promise a win in a readers poll; the count on the live ballot decides.