Best of the LC Valley: How Voting Works & How to Win

Two states, one valley, one ballot

Lewiston sits in Idaho. Clarkston sits directly across the Snake and Clearwater rivers in Washington. Best of the LC Valley treats both as one market, and that's the detail most guides to Idaho readers-choice contests skip entirely.

The mechanics run in two stages. Readers submit nominations first, roughly 8,000 of them in a typical cycle, spread across 170 categories. Inland 360, the Lewiston Tribune's arts-and-culture section, then narrows each category to its real contenders before opening a public vote each spring, usually April, with results published in June. Miss the nomination window and there's no ballot slot to campaign for later.

That 8,000-into-170 ratio is worth sitting with. It averages to under 50 nominations per category before any filtering, which means a category most businesses assume is impossibly crowded may not be. See the Idaho contest hub for how this compares to other statewide and regional programs.

What the nomination data doesn't tell you, and why that's normal

No public per-category nomination breakdown exists. No winner archive going back multiple years sits anywhere on lmtribune.com that this guide can point to. That's not a hole in the research, it's how Inland 360 runs the program, results post once, in June, for the current year, and older claims tend to circulate on outdated flyers rather than an official archive page.

Category fit is the one lever fully in a business's control

With 170 categories and no published nominee counts, guessing the wrong lane costs the entire cycle, not just a few nominations. A coffee shop that also sells pastries needs to know which label its regulars would type first, not which technically fits. Get that wrong during the nomination stage and there's no April write-in to fix it.

For the broader mechanics of running any award-style vote push, award-style vote campaigns covers ground that applies here, and restaurant vote campaign planning is worth a look for the valley's dining and hospitality categories specifically. A business chasing a general community-recognition category rather than a niche one can also check best business of the year voting for planning that overlaps with how Inland 360 frames its own broader categories.

The calendar, worked backward from June

Plan from the June results date backward, not from whenever a nomination email happens to arrive. That single shift changes how a small business staffs the whole cycle.

A business used to a single-stage local poll can treat the nomination round as an afterthought. It isn't. That first stage decides who even reaches the April ballot, well before any vote-day push matters.

Why Lewiston, Clarkston, and the smaller valley towns don't compete evenly, and it doesn't matter

Lewiston is the valley's largest city. Clarkston, across the state line, runs smaller but shares the same combined market for most categories. Asotin, just south of Clarkston, brings a thinner but often more loyal customer base into that identical category pool, no separate bracket by town or by state.

A Lewiston nominee facing a Clarkston competitor in the same category isn't an imbalance the rules created by accident, it's simply what a two-state valley ballot produces. The smaller communities' edge, when they have one, tends to be a faster, more direct customer network rather than a bigger one.

Matching the claim to which of the two rounds actually happened

Because Best of the LC Valley runs nominations and voting as separate stages, a business can say different things honestly depending on which stage just closed. "Nominated for Best of the LC Valley" is accurate the moment the roughly 8,000-entry nomination round ends and a name clears into one of the 170 category ballots. "On the ballot" or "up for a vote" is accurate once the April public round opens. "Winner" belongs only to a category the Tribune has actually posted in its June results, with that category named, since Inland 360 does not publish an interim leaderboard between the two stages.

That staging matters most when checking someone else's claim rather than making your own. A flyer or social post claiming "Best of the LC Valley" without saying which June and which of the 170 categories is either outdated or premature, since the nomination round alone never produces a winner, only a finalist. Ask for the specific category and the specific year before treating any claim as current. On the promotion side, the standard the Tribune's own audience already applies is not complicated, real Lewiston-Clarkston customers voting once during the live April window, in the right category, is the entire legitimate path; nothing about the 8,000-nomination filter or the two-state ballot changes that. Background on running that kind of customer-facing push honestly is at running a legitimate vote campaign, and how online contest votes work covers the general nomination-then-vote mechanics this program builds on. Idaho readers can also compare the Idaho High School Athlete of the Week program and the Idaho High School Player of the Year ballot on the state hub.

Updated for the current Best of the LC Valley nomination-and-vote cycle.