Bubbas People's Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes in the Bubbas and why Key West turns out

The Bubbas People's Choice Awards is Keys Weekly's reader-voted honor roll for Key West, Florida. The Key West newspaper describes it as recognizing the best people and places in the city, and the ballot's categories reach across the whole local economy: bars, seafood, mojitos, accountants, banks, musicians, events, radio personalities, restaurants and the people who make the island what it is. It sits squarely in the best-of tradition, where a publication asks its own audience to crown local favorites.

What makes the program notable is the turnout it commands for a single island market. In one cycle, 4,796 people voted online in the Key West edition, and across the program's categories more than 400,000 votes were placed. For a city of Key West's size, those are numbers that only materialize when a large share of the community treats the ballot as a yearly ritual rather than a link they stumble across.

Keys Weekly is the organizer throughout: the paper publishes the ballot on its own website, promotes the nomination and voting phases in its pages, and then covers the results as news. The program also carries a charitable dimension, with the paper reporting that the Bubbas have raised more than $90,000 for community organizations since the event's inception in 2014.

The Bubbas calendar: editions, windows and what is not printed

Confirmed editions of the Bubbas People's Choice Awards cover 2025 and 2026, and the program's own history stretches much further back. Keys Weekly traces the event's inception to 2014, and the 2024 edition celebrated the program's 11th year, a milestone the paper marked with a July 20 celebration honoring 91 local businesses, people and nonprofits for their commitment to the Key West community.

2025 is the cycle whose day-level anchors are printed. Voting opened June 25, 2025, under the headline that the Bubbas bring out the best of Key West, and supporters were asked to pick the winners through July 6. Before that, the paper ran a nomination push telling readers to nominate their favorites every day, which is the phase that builds the finalist list the public later votes on.

Two things the ballot leaves open. First, Keys Weekly announces each cycle's opening and closing days as the season arrives rather than publishing them far ahead, so a supporter planning around the Bubbas should watch the paper's announcements. Second, the paper sets no printed ceiling on repeat voting and spells out no eligibility terms for the Bubbas ballot; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The scale of past cycles, with hundreds of thousands of votes placed across the program, shows the ballot accommodates heavy participation, but the paper's exact counting terms live on the ballot itself.

How a supporter actually votes in the Bubbas today

Voting happens as a straightforward public poll on Keys Weekly's own website. A supporter opens the ballot at keysweekly.com, the address the paper publishes for the program, and works through the Key West categories printed there. The cycle runs in two phases. In the nomination phase, readers put forward favorites in each category, and Keys Weekly's own promotion has urged them to nominate every day, a daily-return habit that gives a well-organized business repeated exposure to its fans.

Once nominations close, the paper announces the finalists and the voting phase begins. Supporters return to the ballot and pick winners in each category. In 2025 that finals window ran through July 6, after which the results move from the ballot to the paper's coverage and, in milestone years, to a celebration event like the 2024 gathering on July 20.

For a business hoping to appear on the ballot, the practical sequence is the same one supporters follow. Ask customers to nominate the business by name during the nomination phase, then, once the finalist list is out, ask the same people to come back and pick winners. Because the ballot spans so many Key West lanes, a restaurant, bar or musician is competing inside its own category rather than against the whole island, which makes a focused customer push far more effective than a general appeal. The volume is real: more than 400,000 votes were placed across the program in a single cycle, so every organized push has to be repeated to register.

How the Bubbas sits beside Florida's other best-of ballots

Among Florida's many reader-voted honors, the Bubbas occupy a specific corner. Where most of the state's programs cover a metro or the whole state, this one is anchored to a single island city and run by the newspaper that covers it daily. That gives the Bubbas a community feel the larger ballots cannot match: 4,796 voters in a Key West edition represent a far deeper slice of the local population than the same number would in a statewide poll.

The closest neighbours here are the state's other programs. The Best of Florida Awards covers the entire state, while the Best of Miami Readers' Poll, the Best of Orlando ballot, the Best of Tallahassee program, Best of the Bay and Best in Destin each answer to their own publisher and market. A Key West business listed on several of these ballots needs a separate push for each, because a vote on one ballot carries no weight toward any other.

What distinguishes the Bubbas within that field is longevity and charity. Since 2014 the program has raised more than $90,000 for community organizations, and its 11th-year celebration in 2024 honored 91 honorees in one night. Few Florida best-of ballots can point to both a decade-plus run and a fundraising total attached to the awards themselves.

Strengthening support in the Bubbas without breaking the paper's rules

Because the Bubbas run in two phases, the strongest campaigns treat nomination and voting as separate pushes. During the nomination phase, a Key West business should ask every customer, face to face and at the register, to nominate it by name, and repeat the ask daily as Keys Weekly itself suggests. Once finalists are named, the same people need a second reminder to return and pick winners before the July close of the finals window.

Keys Weekly prints no rule about outside help or bought votes on this ballot, so a business weighing paid support should read the conditions the paper sets on the ballot itself before committing anything. The general legal and platform questions are laid out at is buying votes legal, and the mechanics of paid vote packages are described at buy votes online. What no organizer disputes is that organic, repeated asks from the business itself are always within the spirit of a people's choice award, and in a market as tight as Key West they are usually enough to move a category.