Now In Mesa County Senior Mags Best Of Poll (kool1079): How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Mesa County Senior Mags Best Of Poll is and who runs it

The Now In Mesa County Senior Mags Best Of Poll is a readers' choice ballot that KBKL runs. KBKL is the Colorado radio station broadcasting as Kool 107.9. The program is carried on the domain the station operates, kool1079.com, instead of a shared balloting service, which means the station controls the form, the wording and the deadline messaging directly.

The poll is branded around the station's Senior Mag's publication. The page text ties the vote to "The Beacon", a publication that, in the station's own words, has been around Mesa County and Montrose County for a long time, and the 2020 cycle was promoted as the Mesa County Beacon Best of 2020. The audience is local by design: the page invites readers to share opinions with the world, or at least Mesa County.

In format this is a familiar best-of survey. Rather than nominating a single winner, the ballot asks supporters to name a favorite business in each field, and the fields printed on the page read like a tour of small-town commerce, from lunch spots to house painters.

The dated facts: which editions ran and when the window falls

KBKL's poll has two confirmed editions, 2019 and 2020. Both are anchored to December. The 2019 ballot was live at the start of that month and the page told readers, "You have until December 31, 2019, to turn in your ballot." That gives the 2019 cycle a window running from December 1 through December 31, 2019, a full month of voting with the close falling on the last day of the year.

The 2020 cycle is confirmed as the Mesa County Beacon Best of 2020, with voting described as underway on the same ballot page. Per-day opening and closing times for the 2020 edition were not printed in the same way, so the December anchor is the firm part of that history.

Beyond 2020, the picture is open. The ballot page has remained on kool1079.com in later years, but KBKL has not announced a year for the next edition, and no date for a future cycle is published anywhere on the page. The organizer also leaves the per-supporter vote cap and any eligibility rules off the ballot page; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. A supporter planning around this poll should treat the December pattern as the working assumption and read the actual dates off the live ballot before committing to anything.

How a supporter votes in the Senior Mags Best Of Poll today

Voting takes little effort. The supporter loads the ballot at kool1079.com, scrolls through the Best Of fields, and types a local favorite into each field they want to answer. The page frames the exercise as a survey the reader owns: the station tells readers they have a survey all their own, and there is no rush, only a deadline to respect.

The fields name categories rather than candidates. On the page, the picks run from Best Hair Salon and Best Real Estate to Best Fruit Stand, Best Local Band, Best Optical Store, Best Pet Supply, Best Restaurant for Lunch, Best Date, Best Ice Cream and Best House Painter. These are the fields printed on the ballot page, not a certified full roster, and the exact set can differ from cycle to cycle. Because the fields are open picks, a supporter writes in the business they favor rather than choosing from a fixed candidate list.

Submission happens on the same page, and the station promotes a reveal of results afterward under its What's Hot banner. The page describes no account signup, no email check and no sign-in gate, so the practical barrier to voting is low, which is typical of a radio station survey aimed at the widest possible local audience.

How this ballot sits beside its Colorado neighbours

Colorado's best-of scene is crowded, and this poll sits at the small-market end of it. The state's biggest readers' choice programs are metro anchored: Best of Denver from Westword covers the state's largest city, and Top of the Town from 5280 runs a parallel Denver list. Further afield, Best of the Springs serves its own Front Range market, Best of NOCO covers the northern Colorado corridor, Best of Summit County works the mountain resort towns, and Best of the Boat covers its resort-corridor market in the northwest.

Against that set, the Senior Mags poll is unusual in three ways. Its organizer is a radio station, not a magazine or newspaper chain, so promotion runs through on-air mentions and the station's What's Hot banner. Its market is a single Western Slope county, Mesa County, with reach into neighbouring Montrose County, rather than a metro or a resort corridor. And its host is kool1079.com itself, so the ballot's rules and deadlines live on the station's pages instead of on a shared balloting service.

For a local business, that means the competition pool is the county's own businesses, not statewide brands, and a win carries weight with the listeners who already know the station.

Strengthening support in a single-county radio ballot

Because this ballot is an open pick survey on the station's pages, support grows the way radio surveys always have: by reaching the people who already trust the business. A Mesa County shop can ask every customer at the till, post the ballot link with the business's name pre-written for each field, and ask staff and regulars to pass it on. The December anchor means a push in the first weeks of the month has room to work before the close.

No rule text about outside help appears on the ballot page, so the safe position is to keep every ask genuine and local. Anything that inflates the count without real supporters behind it risks the station's deletion tools and the reveal moment, where a business with no local footprint looks out of place. For a grounded view of what works in public ballots like this one, see our votes guide, and for what purchased support does and does not promise, our award votes page sets out the position without promises.