Best of Boulder (Boulder Weekly): How Voting Works & How to Win

Five editions, a four-year gap in the middle, and no shared platform behind any of it

Best of Boulder isn't hosted through a market-network voting platform the way some readers'-choice ballots are. Boulder Weekly, a Colorado newspaper, runs it directly on its own site, at boulderweekly.com/special-editions/best-of-boulder/, and has done so for five confirmed editions.

Those five editions land unevenly: 2018 and 2019, then a jump to 2024, 2025 and 2026. Nothing published fills the years in between, 2020 through 2023, so a nominee looking for an unbroken decade of past cycles won't find one here. What is confirmed for the current cycle is narrower still: an August 4, 2026 update said the voting stage was about to open, without naming the exact day it starts or ends. That narrower window is the piece worth acting on now, since the wider gap in the middle of the program's history is settled and cannot be filled in after the fact.

Treat the bottom two rows as open questions rather than settled ones. Confirm on the live ballot each cycle, since a program with a multi-year gap in its own history is less predictable than one that ran without interruption.

One newspaper's own ballot, not a shared statewide network

Colorado's other readers'-choice "best of" pages mostly follow the same shape Best of Boulder does: each one belongs to a specific publisher's own site rather than a common voting platform shared across cities.

None of those six other publishers touch Boulder Weekly's own results, so a Best of Boulder nomination changes nothing about how any of them get judged. A business active on several of these ballots at once is effectively juggling six unrelated entry forms rather than filling out one shared application.

Reading Boulder Weekly's own description of itself

Boulder Weekly calls itself Boulder County's independent voice on its own site, a description that frames the paper's editorial scope rather than a formal rule about who may enter or vote in Best of Boulder. What actually governs entry and voting is whatever the live ballot form states once the current stage is confirmed open.

A ballot named for Boulder, without a wider service area attached

Boulder is the city name Boulder Weekly attaches to this ballot, and nothing in what's confirmed extends that to a formally defined region beyond the city itself. No list of neighboring towns and no separate boundary rule appears in the confirmed text.

A business weighing whether it qualifies should treat "Boulder" narrowly, as the paper itself uses the name, and check the live form directly rather than assume a wider area automatically applies.

The 2025 edition also carried its own page tied specifically to a cannabis-related category, separate from the main Best of Boulder address. That kind of category-specific page suggests the ballot splits into more than one section behind the scenes, even though no single published list spells out every section by name for the current cycle.

Working around a gap in the schedule rather than a steady annual run

A four-year gap between 2019 and 2024 means Best of Boulder doesn't offer the kind of unbroken annual history some other Colorado "best of" pages can point to. That makes the current, narrower signal, an August update saying voting was about to open, more useful to act on than any assumption based on how past cycles played out.

Reaching actual Boulder customers directly, and asking more than once while the stage is open, matters more here than guessing at a cap or a deadline that Boulder Weekly hasn't published. Activity that doesn't look like it came from real supporters creates a problem on any ballot, and a program still missing several full years from its own history stands to lose more credibility from that kind of problem than one with an unbroken run behind it.

is buying votes legal covers where paid help stays reasonable for a program shaped like this one, and buying votes online explains what that kind of assistance commonly involves. Award-vote campaign planning is built around the same readers'-choice format Best of Boulder follows.