Lincoln's Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

What 89,000 nominations and 369,000 votes actually reveal

369,000. That's the vote count the Lincoln Journal Star and GoodLifeNetwork logged for Lincoln's Choice Awards in 2025, built on roughly 89,000 nominations filed before the ballot even opened. Divide one by the other and the average lands near four votes cast for every nomination submitted, a ratio that says something specific about how this program actually runs.

There is no judges' panel sitting behind either number. Fans nominate, fans vote, and the Journal Star's role is running the mechanism, not picking winners. That single structural fact separates Lincoln's Choice Awards from readers'-choice ballots that quietly narrow a public nomination list down to a small judged shortlist before opening the real vote.

Category names, a per-day vote cap, and the exact dates the nomination and voting windows open and close: none of that shows up anywhere the Journal Star or GoodLifeNetwork has made public. Rather than guess, treat journalstar.com itself as the only live source for that detail each cycle.

No judges' panel: how this differs from its Nebraska siblings

Run a comparison across Nebraska's readers'-choice ballots and Lincoln's Choice Awards stands out for one reason: nobody sits behind the count deciding who deserves to win. Best of Grand Island, run by the Grand Island Independent, layers a $500 Visa gift-card drawing onto its ballot-completion step. Best of Kearney, run independently by the Kearney Hub, leans on the nominated businesses themselves to drive most of the traffic. Lincoln's version skips incentive raffles and business-driven promotion in favor of raw scale: 89,000 nominations is a wide net for a single-city ballot.

Union Bank & Trust presenting the program adds a wrinkle none of the other three carry publicly: a bank headquartered in Lincoln backing an award a Lincoln business can put its name next to. That's a sponsor relationship, not a judging role. The vote total, not a boardroom, still decides the winner.

Nomination, voting, and an April night at the Rococo Theatre

Two stages, not one. A business first needs a nomination, then needs the vote once the ballot itself opens. The 2025 numbers show roughly 89,000 people took the first step and 369,000 took the second, so the gap between the two stages is real, but nothing in the public record breaks either total down by category or business.

What's fixed: the ceremony lands every April, in person, at the Rococo Theatre in downtown Lincoln. Anyone who can't make it inside can watch on GoodLifeNetwork.tv instead, which streams the ceremony live rather than posting results after the fact in a press release.

What's still confirm-on-the-day territory

A specific nomination deadline, a voting-window close date, and a stated cap on votes per person: the Journal Star hasn't put any of that in writing that this page could find. Those are exactly the details that shift year to year on a locally run ballot like this one, so journalstar.com during the live cycle is the source to trust over a date carried forward from last year.

A ceremony at a landmark downtown venue, broadcast live rather than emailed out after the fact, tells a business something about how the Journal Star treats the results. It's worth building outreach around that April date once it's confirmed, not around a guess.

Lincoln's business geography, from the Haymarket to Air Park

Lincoln isn't one commercial strip. Downtown and the Haymarket District carry the densest concentration of restaurants, bars, and retail that most readers think of first. University Place, Near South, Air Park, and College View spread the city's business base into neighborhoods a lot of out-of-towners never hear named, each with its own loyal customers who don't necessarily cross into downtown traffic.

A downtown or Haymarket business starts a nomination push with built-in foot traffic and customers already primed to notice a sign near the register. A College View or Air Park business works from a smaller, tighter radius, one where a nomination often depends on regulars remembering to click through rather than on passersby noticing a poster. Neither position guarantees anything on a ballot where 89,000 people already showed up once.

The University of Nebraska–Lincoln sits close to the middle of that map too, adding a rotating population of students and staff who nominate and vote alongside the city's longer-term residents. That mix, permanent Lincoln households plus a large university population, is part of what gets a single-city ballot to a 369,000-vote total.

Running an honest Lincoln's Choice Awards campaign

Two asks, two moments. While nominations are open, the message is simple: ask real customers to submit the business's name. Once the ballot itself opens, the ask changes to actually voting, and a business that treats those as the same step loses the customers who nominated once and assumed they were done.

Automated entries, duplicate accounts, or claiming a category placement the Journal Star hasn't published yet put a business's standing at risk in a market where word travels fast between the Haymarket and campus. Is buying votes legal covers the general risk profile that applies to a public ballot like this one; worth reading before any budget goes into a push.

For the mechanics behind a real-supporter push generally, how online contest votes work is the starting point, and award-style vote campaigns covers the pattern that fits an annual readers'-choice ballot like this one. Nebraska runs several of these in parallel: Best of Grand Island and Best of Kearney both cover different Nebraska cities on their own separate ballots, and the full state directory sits at the Nebraska contest hub.

Confirm nomination and voting windows on journalstar.com each cycle; the exact dates within April are not fixed.