Colorado Springs Top of Town: How Voting Works & How to Win

Why Does a Colorado Springs Magazine Contest Share Denver's Name?

Coloradospringsmag.com/tott. That's the whole address for Colorado Springs Magazine's Top of Town contest, and the short form in the URL, tott, is the first clue that this program takes its own name seriously. A hundred miles north, 5280 Magazine runs a Denver contest called Top of the Town, three letters longer and published by a completely different masthead.

Nobody publishes an explanation for why two Colorado city magazines landed on nearly identical branding, and nothing in the record checked for this guide says whether one borrowed the other's idea, whether the two are connected at all, or which one actually ran first. They just did.

That naming overlap matters for a business trying to find the right ballot. A Colorado Springs shop owner searching "vote top of town colorado" risks landing on Denver's page, reading Denver's rules, and never reaching coloradospringsmag.com/tott at all. The two share a near-identical name and, so far as this guide can confirm, nothing else: different city, different publisher, different URL.

What the shared name doesn't tell you

It doesn't say whether the magazines are related companies. It doesn't say which one copied the other. None of that is stated anywhere checked here, so none of it appears as fact on this page. What is confirmed: Colorado Springs Magazine runs its own Top of Town program, on its own domain, for its own city.

The city itself explains why a second Top of Town makes sense in the first place. Colorado Springs is Colorado's second-largest city, anchored by the Air Force Academy to the north and Fort Carson to the south, with Pikes Peak standing over the whole valley. A metro with an identity this distinct from Denver's doesn't need Denver's magazine to validate its own readers-choice award.

How Much of the Top of Town Ballot Is Actually Public?

Not much, measured against what a business might expect from a magazine-run readers-choice award. The record checked for this guide confirms three things: Colorado Springs Magazine sponsors it, the ballot lives at coloradospringsmag.com/tott, and the program runs annually. That's the full list.

No category breakdown is published anywhere checked here. A downtown coffee shop has no way to confirm, from the public record alone, whether it competes in a general food-and-drink group or something narrower. No vote cap appears either, so whether a supporter can vote once or many times over is a question only the live page can answer at the moment someone checks it. No exact nomination window or close date is stated, unlike Best of the Springs, where at least the fact that voting had already closed for the year was itself confirmable.

Why naming the gap beats guessing at it

A plausible category list, Dining, Shopping, Services, Nightlife, would read fine right up until it turned out wrong for this specific magazine's ballot. So it doesn't appear here. The honest version of this guide is shorter than a padded one, and it's also the version worth trusting.

That last row is worth sitting with. Even the format of the announcement, a magazine issue, a webpage, an event of some kind, isn't confirmed anywhere in this record. A business planning around "we'll find out when the issue drops" is assuming a detail nobody has actually published for this specific program.

Where Does a Colorado Springs Business Actually Cast a Vote?

One address: coloradospringsmag.com/tott. Nothing in the confirmed record points to a separate app, a licensed third-party voting platform, or a per-business sub-page the way some readers-choice programs run. Whatever the ballot screen looks like once someone lands there, the entry point itself is singular, which at least makes it simple to share correctly.

That's a small, real advantage over one of its Colorado Springs neighbors. Best of the Springs, the Gazette's competing citywide award, also runs on a single domain, but its 2026 cycle had already closed by the time that record was checked, with results landing in a print book rather than online. Top of Town's page doesn't confirm a results format either way, so there isn't public evidence of whether this program even shows a leaderboard while voting is live.

What "annual" actually confirms, and what it doesn't

Annual tells a business to expect a new cycle roughly once a year. It doesn't say which month that cycle opens, how long it runs, or whether last year's calendar repeats this year. Colorado Springs Magazine hasn't published that detail on the pages checked here. Bookmarking coloradospringsmag.com/tott itself, rather than a remembered date, is the safer habit.

Compare that to the state's weekly sports polls. Colorado Baseball Player of the Week and Colorado Boys Basketball Player of the Week both run on a fixed weekly rhythm, a new nominee slate every cycle, all season long. An annual magazine award like Top of Town moves at a completely different speed: one open window a year, then roughly eleven months where the same URL just sits there, unchanged, waiting.

What Does Legitimate Turnout Look Like in a Five-Base Military Town?

Colorado Springs isn't a small town leaning on a bigger media market for attention. It's home to the Air Force Academy, Fort Carson, Peterson and Schriever Space Force Bases, and Cheyenne Mountain Space Force Station, five separate installations inside one metro, plus the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Training Center downtown. That mix gives a Colorado Springs business something a Denver business running Best of Denver doesn't have in quite the same concentration: a population of service members and their families who rotate through on a few years' cycle and lean on local word-of-mouth fast, because they don't have years to figure out the city on their own.

A coffee shop near the Academy's north gate, a restaurant in Old Colorado City, a shop off Manitou Springs' main strip: each pulls from a genuinely different customer base within one metro. Fountain and Widefield, south toward Fort Carson, run on Army family turnover. Rockrimmon and Stetson Hills skew toward longer-tenured civilian households. Treating "Colorado Springs" as one undifferentiated audience leaves real turnout on the table for a Top of Town push.

What actually counts as a real campaign here

Send the exact coloradospringsmag.com/tott link to real past customers. Not a vague "go vote for us" post with no URL attached. Repeat that outreach for as long as the window, unconfirmed in length as it is, stays open. Award-style vote campaign support built for readers-choice programs can extend that reach across a business's own audience, but it can't manufacture an audience that doesn't already exist. Fabricated accounts or scripted traffic carry real risk in a city where military families rotate out fast, and reputations follow them through the same reassignment networks that brought them in.

How Does Top of Town Compare to Colorado's Other Readers-Choice Ballots?

Four other programs sit alongside Top of Town on Colorado's fan-vote map. No two of them work quite the same way.

Two things stand out. Three separate Colorado publishers run their own annual readers-choice award, and Colorado Springs alone hosts two of them under two different owners. None of the annual programs confirm a vote cap or a public results format, while the weekly sports polls at least show a running count while their ballots are open, including Colorado Boys Basketball Player of the Week.

What that means for a Colorado Springs business running more than one campaign in the same year: Top of Town and Best of the Springs aren't the same push run twice under two names. They're two different organizers, two unconfirmed calendars, and, going by everything public here, two different silences on exactly how either ballot actually gets decided. How online contest votes work covers mechanics that apply across any of these formats, and reading is buying votes legal is worth the time before committing budget to a program that hasn't even confirmed its own rules yet. See the Colorado contests directory for what else is currently active statewide.