Best of Des Moines (CITYVIEW): How Voting Works & How to Win

The ballot is a blank, not a list to click through

best.dmcityview.com. Not dmcityview.com, the main CITYVIEW site — a separate subdomain, and the one that actually carries the Best of Des Moines ballot. A visitor who searches the main site for a "vote" link may come up empty; the write-in form lives on its own address.

That address matters because of what sits behind it: a fill-in-the-blank format. Type the business name into the category field directly. No dropdown of pre-loaded finalists, no shortlist to scroll past first. Whoever gets written in the most, in whatever form CITYVIEW's own rules define, is how the category resolves.

A full category list, a vote cap, a confirmed results page: none of those three surface in CITYVIEW's own public materials. Rather than guess at them, treat best.dmcityview.com itself as the only live source once the window opens. The Iowa contest hub lists the state's other public-vote programs for comparison.

Des Moines runs three separate readers-choice ballots. This is the write-in one.

A Des Moines business chasing metro recognition is realistically choosing between three different organizers, not one contest wearing three names. The Des Moines Business Record runs an open 75-category survey. CommunityVotes runs a nominate-then-vote structure across five category groups. CITYVIEW runs the fill-in-the-blank ballot described on this page. None of the three share a results page, a category list, or a calendar.

A business running write-in campaigns on both CITYVIEW and, say, the Business Record survey needs two separate reminder messages on two separate calendars, not one copy-pasted link. The CommunityVotes ballot runs on a third calendar entirely, with a nomination gate CITYVIEW's format skips outright.

What the September-to-November window actually confirms, and what it doesn't

Three months. That's the real length of CITYVIEW's window, September 1 through November 30, longer than most single-month newspaper best-of cycles. The 2026 edition is confirmed active, which at minimum tells a business the format is currently running rather than dormant or discontinued.

What isn't on the public record checked here

No confirmed vote cap. No confirmed category list. No confirmed results channel. Those gaps matter more on a write-in ballot than a pick-list one, because a business can't even confirm which categories exist without checking best.dmcityview.com directly during the live window.

Naming those gaps honestly beats guessing at a category list that might not exist yet for 2026. For the general mechanics behind any write-in or nomination push, award-style vote campaign planning covers ground that applies regardless of which of the three Des Moines ballots a business is running.

Des Moines' suburbs write in on the same ballot, not separate ones

Ankeny, one of Iowa's fastest-growing suburbs, sits a short drive northeast of downtown Des Moines. West Des Moines runs its own retail and business corridor along the Jordan Creek strip. Urbandale, Johnston, Waukee, Clive, and Windsor Heights round out the ring of communities that make up Greater Des Moines' actual customer geography, and nothing in CITYVIEW's confirmed format separates any of them into their own bracket.

That's worth sitting with for a second. A West Des Moines retailer and a downtown Des Moines retailer write in under the same category, competing for the same slot, rather than running in parallel suburb-specific heats. A business assuming its geography grants it a smaller, friendlier competitive pool is working from an assumption the ballot's own structure doesn't support.

What does help here is real reach across whichever of those communities the business actually serves. A Clive dental practice and a Waukee dental practice, both trying to get written in under the same category, draw from different local patient bases even though they'd land on the identical CITYVIEW ballot line. Knowing exactly which zip codes send real customers through the door counts for more than a generalized "vote for us" push aimed at the whole metro.

Building a write-in campaign that actually holds up

Precision beats volume on a fill-in-the-blank ballot. A supporter has to type the exact business name, not select it from a list, so every reminder should carry that exact spelling. A campaign that varies "Joe's Pizza," "Joes Pizza Des Moines," and "Joe's" across three different posts is quietly splitting its own write-in count three ways.

Real customers, employees, and community contacts pointed at best.dmcityview.com during the September-through-November window are the actual mechanism here. Fabricated activity or automated submissions risk the entry itself in a metro small enough that an inflated claim gets noticed; downtown Des Moines and the surrounding suburbs share enough overlapping social and business networks that an implausible spike draws attention fast.

Before results are confirmed, "write us in for Best of Des Moines" is the honest framing. Once CITYVIEW actually publishes an outcome for a specific year and category, that's the claim worth making publicly, and not before. See how online contest votes work for the general mechanics behind a push like this. A write-in ballot is still a paid-promotion decision, and is buying votes legal lays out the legal footing before any budget goes toward it.