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

What is the Elbert Best of the Best and who runs it?

Elbert Best of the Best is the readers survey of Colorado Community Media, a community newspaper publisher working across Colorado, and its most recent confirmed edition carried the title Elbert Best of the Best 2025. The programme sits squarely in the best-of vertical: rather than ranking restaurants, teams or personalities by expert judgment, it hands each category to the audience and lets public support decide which local business or community favorite finishes on top. Colorado Community Media hosts the ballot on its own corner of the Second Street platform, the ballot software many publishers use for readers-choice contests, at a dedicated web address rather than inside an ordinary news article.

That separation matters for anyone planning to take part. The ballot is the destination where every pick happens, and the publisher pushes readers there directly. Its promotional language for the 2025 round read, "Ready. Set. *Vote*. Until April 15! Show your love for your hometown favorite by voting in our annual readers survey.", a message that tells supporters both what the event is and how the organizer frames it: a recurring salute to hometown favorites rather than a limited stunt. The same copy calls the survey annual, which matches the edition trail documented below.

When has the Elbert Best of the Best run, and when does voting open?

Archival holdings at a Colorado library collection trace the brand a long way back. Colorado Community Newspapers, the group's predecessor, printed Best of the Best sections with one dated March 14, 2001, followed by further printings in 2004, June 2005, June 2006 and June 2007. Those early sections make the survey one of the longer-running fixtures among Colorado community polls, predating the move of readers-choice balloting onto dedicated web platforms.

Under the Colorado Community Media name the survey carried on into the digital era, with recorded editions in 2020, 2022, 2023 and 2025. The organizer describes the rhythm itself: "From March 1 to April 15 every year, your voice can join in this celebration." That line fixes both the cadence and the season: a spring window opening at the start of March and shutting two weeks into April. The 2025 ballot followed it exactly, live from March 1 until the close on April 15, 2025, and the live ballot page labelled that stretch a voting round.

Not everything about the survey is published with the same clarity. Colorado Community Media prints neither the category roster nor a per-supporter voting rule beside the ballot; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. No interim stages, such as a separate nomination or finalist phase, were promoted between the opening and closing dates either, and nothing published so far spells out which towns and counties the Elbert edition covers beyond the name itself.

How does a supporter vote in the Elbert Best of the Best?

Supporters vote through the ballot itself, and nothing about the sequence is complicated. While the spring round is live, the ballot at coloradocommunitymedia.secondstreetapp.com/Elbert-Best-of-the-Best-2025/ presents the survey directly: its category list sits on the page, a supporter moves through the categories marking the local favorite worth saluting in each, and the finished ballot is submitted. The 2025 ballot showed no prompt to register or sign in before picking, so the whole sequence happens in a single visit to the page.

A phone handles the ballot as comfortably as a desktop, because it is simply a web form served by Second Street. The window controls everything: a pick typed in before the start of March or after the middle of April has nowhere to land, since the 2025 round accepted entries only between its opening day and its closing day. Supporters who prefer to spread their picks over several sittings can return to the address while the round runs; whether partial progress survives between visits depends on settings the organizer has not described, so completing the form in one sitting is the dependable habit.

Treat the instructions shown on the ballot as the authority as well. Habits imported from other readers surveys do not transfer automatically, because each publisher sets its own per-supporter practice, and the Elbert ballot is no exception.

How does this ballot compare with other Colorado best-of surveys?

Colorado readers have plenty of best-of ballots to choose from, and this survey holds its own lane among them. The sibling set on this site includes Top of the Town from 5280, Best of Denver from Westword, Best of NOCO from NOCO Style, Best of the Springs from the Gazette, Best of Summit County and Best of the Boat. Every one of those ballots answers to a separate newsroom, keeps its own calendar and courts its own audience, so a favorite saluted on the Elbert form never crosses onto another publisher's sheet.

What separates Elbert Best of the Best is its parentage and its shape. It belongs to Colorado Community Media, a community newspaper group rather than a metro magazine, and it compresses its voting into a compact spring window, which means supporters splitting attention between several Colorado ballots face different deadlines in each. Its heritage also stands apart: few siblings in that list can point to a print lineage stretching back to the Colorado Community Newspapers era, and the publisher still presents the survey as a hometown tradition rather than a media-brand popularity list.

Readers who follow several of these surveys can treat them as complements rather than substitutes. The same customer base can appear on a community ballot and a metro ballot without either cannibalizing the other, and organizers count the support separately on every ballot they run.

Can supporters strengthen a favorite's chances in this survey?

A favorite's chances rise with visibility, and the levers are ordinary ones: ask loyal customers to fill in the ballot during the March-to-April stretch, share the Second Street address while the round runs, and remind people a few days before the deadline arrives. For campaigns wanting more reach than organic sharing delivers, paid vote services exist for public readers surveys, and their general mechanics are covered in the guide to getting more votes online.

Whether outside help fits this particular ballot depends on rules Colorado Community Media has not printed, so anyone weighing it should first study whatever conditions the Elbert ballot sets beside its categories. The legal position on paying for votes is outlined at the legality page, and the service landscape is summarized on the general votes page. No vote service, whichever provider a campaign chooses, can promise a finishing position; the ballot decides that.