Best Of Fremont 2016 Award Winners Announced!! - Fremocentrist: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Best of Fremont ballot is and who runs it

A Fremont business or neighbor that wants recognition here faces a specific problem: this is a small, email-gated community ballot, and the publisher does not print next cycle's dates in advance. Before planning anything around it, it helps to know exactly what the program is and who controls it.

Best of Fremont is the readers' choice award run by Fremocentrist, the independent publication at fremocentrist.com published by Kirby Laney. The masthead describes a fremocentrist as a person who believes everything revolves around Fremont, and the site carries news and commentary for the community. The award program is community-focused and sits in the best-of vertical: rather than judging entries itself, the publication asks its readers to name the people and organizations they rate highest.

The ballot sits on fremocentrist.com itself, with no third-party contest platform between the reader and the vote call. That call lives at fremocentrist.com/vote-best-of-fremont-2012-today/, and the publisher has reused that address across cycles, which is why the year in the headline matters more than the URL.

The dated trail: which editions are confirmed and when voting falls

For this ballot, the editions the publisher's trail pins down are 2012 and 2026. The 2012 cycle is the best documented: its ballot page carried the headline Vote Best of Fremont 2012 Today, drew its suggested nominees from the Fremocentrist.com column published in November, and accepted votes until midnight on December 31, 2012. The publisher's own pages also state that voting for the 2016 Best of Fremont opened on November 15, which fixes a mid-November opening for at least that cycle.

The program is annual. The publisher describes the ballot as an annual feature, and a 2026 edition is confirmed alongside the 2012 origin. What the publisher has not printed in one place is the full roster of intervening years, so a specific year between 2012 and 2026 should be treated as unverified until the site itself shows it.

For the cycle in front of you, the practical gap is timing. The publisher does not publish next cycle's opening and closing dates ahead of the ballot, and no separate nomination round is described on the pages available; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Until then, the mid-November nominee column and the December 31 closing of the 2012 cycle are the only fixed markers the program's own pages provide.

How a supporter votes on the Best of Fremont ballot today

The design here is about as plain as a community ballot gets, and that plainness is why it spreads by word of mouth. To take part, a reader goes to the ballot page on fremocentrist.com, reads the vote call, and casts picks across the named fields: Fremont's Best Neighbor, Fremont's Best Business, and Fremont's Best Organization or Project for the year shown. The ballot does not hand the reader a shortlist to tick. Instead, the Fremocentrist.com column publishes an extensive list of suggested nominees from November, and supporters use that pool as a starting point for their own choices.

Submission runs through email. The publisher's printed rule is that anyone with an email address is eligible to vote, and each email address may vote only once. That single sentence carries most of the program's weight: it makes the ballot open to any reader, and it makes each address a scarce unit of support. A household of four cannot quadruple a vote from one inbox.

The deadline is printed on the live page rather than fixed in advance. In 2012, votes were accepted until midnight on December 31 of that year, and the page encouraged readers not to wait. The current cycle's closing date follows the same pattern: it appears on the ballot itself, so read it before assuming there is spare time.

How this ballot sits beside its Nebraska neighbours

Fremont's readers' choice scene is unusual in that the city carries separate programs from different publishers. The Fremocentrist ballot is community-focused and distinct from the Best of Fremont contest run by the Fremont Tribune, so a supporter who votes on one has not voted in the other. Checking the masthead on the page is the only reliable way to tell them apart.

Within Nebraska, this program belongs to a wider family of best-of ballots covered on this site. The nearest siblings in shape are Best of Grand Island, Best of Kearney, and Best of Omaha, each run by its own publisher in its own city. Omaha also carries a second program, Best of the Big O, which shows how a single market can hold more than one readers' choice contest, exactly as Fremont does.

Lincoln contributes two more entries of different shapes: the Lincoln Parade of Homes and the Lincoln's Choice Awards. What separates the Fremont ballot from all of them is scale and hosting. It runs on the publisher's site itself rather than a contest platform, it gates votes by email address rather than by form account, and its nominee pool comes from a monthly column rather than an open entry form.

Building real support under this ballot's email rule

Because each email address may vote only once, the only way to move a Best of Fremont result is to reach more distinct supporters, and the calendar matters as much as the ask. The suggested-nominee column runs from November, and the 2016 cycle opened on November 15, so the window in which a reminder actually converts is short and falls late in the year.

The organizer's own rules are the frame for any push. Eligibility is broad, since anyone with an email address may vote, but the one-ballot-per-address limit means repeat asks to the same inbox add nothing. A business that wants votes here does best asking customers in person, posting the ballot link while the window is open, and making sure each supporter uses their own address. For a wider menu of approaches that suit a small email-gated ballot, see our guide to getting more votes online, and for the rules-side questions see the legality overview.