Best of the Best – Best of the Midwest: How Voting Works & How to Win

Fargo, Bismarck, and Jamestown share one ballot domain here

bestofthemidwest.com. Not fargo.communityvotes.com, not bismarcktribune.com, one shared address covering more than a single North Dakota city at once. Best of the Best – Best of the Midwest runs as an Upper Midwest platform, and the confirmed record names three ND cities directly on that shared ballot: Fargo, Bismarck, and Jamestown.

That's a different shape than most of the state's other readers-choice programs. CommunityVotes runs a separate subdomain for Fargo and another for Bismarck. The Bismarck Tribune runs its own Gannett ballot. Best of the Midwest, by contrast, puts multiple cities under one roof, and the platform's reach doesn't stop at the state line either. The same brand lists South Dakota communities, Sioux Falls and Rapid City among them, on the identical bestofthemidwest.com domain.

One more confirmed detail worth naming here: the Jamestown Sun's own Best of the Best ballot, a 17-year-old local program with more than 32,400 votes in its 2025 edition, is separately featured on bestofthemidwest.com/jamestown. That's a crossover, not a merger. The Jamestown Sun still runs its own print magazine and its own local process; Best of the Midwest simply carries a Jamestown listing on its own broader domain too.

How Best of the Midwest sits next to North Dakota's other named ballots

North Dakota already runs a full stack of readers-choice programs. CommunityVotes Bismarck and its Fargo counterpart at CommunityVotes Fargo each operate on their own city-specific subdomain. Bismarck Tribune Best of the Best runs through Gannett's own newspaper ballot system. None of the three shares infrastructure with bestofthemidwest.com, and none of them lists more than one city.

A Fargo business weighing all of this has a real decision to make. Entering CommunityVotes Fargo alone reaches one platform's audience. Entering Best of the Midwest too reaches a second, differently branded readership, one that also touches Bismarck and Jamestown shoppers who might cross paths with a Fargo business through regional shopping trips or franchise locations. Neither entry cancels the other out. They're separate ballots with separate results.

What's confirmed about how the ballot runs, and what still needs a live check

Three cities. One shared domain. A South Dakota extension. That's the actual confirmed shape of Best of the Best – Best of the Midwest at the time of writing. No published category list, no stated vote cap, and no fixed nomination or close date sit alongside those facts. Guessing at any of them would say more than the record actually supports.

Why the gap gets named instead of filled

A business owner searching for how this specific ballot works deserves the plain version. Fargo, Bismarck, and Jamestown appearing on one shared domain is real and checkable right now. A specific voting cadence, whether it's a straight one-step vote or a nominate-then-finalist structure the way some Gannett markets run it, simply is not published anywhere public, so it does not appear here as though it were.

That first row matters more than it might look. North Dakota has other sizable markets; Grand Forks and Minot both run their own CommunityVotes editions, and nothing in the public record here says whether either city also appears on Best of the Midwest. A business in either place should check the live site directly rather than assume inclusion or exclusion either way.

Two states, several economies: reading the geography behind this ballot

Fargo anchors the Red River Valley, a farm-equipment and finance hub that has grown into North Dakota's largest metro by a wide margin. Bismarck, the state capital, runs a government- and healthcare-driven economy a few hours west. Jamestown sits between the two on I-94, smaller, close-knit, the kind of town where a Best of the Best win still gets talked about at the coffee shop counter for months. Three very different local economies. One shared ballot.

Add South Dakota to that picture and the platform's actual reach gets wider still. Sioux Falls and Rapid City sit hundreds of miles from Jamestown, closer in spirit to their own state's business scene than to North Dakota's. A Bismarck business owner likely has no idea their listing shares a domain with a Sioux Falls competitor two states away in market terms, even if it's one state away on a map.

None of that changes how a single business should campaign. What it does mean: a generic "go vote for us on Best of the Midwest" message risks confusing a Fargo customer who has never heard of the Jamestown or South Dakota side of the platform. Naming the actual city page, not just the brand, is the difference between a link that works and one a supporter has to hunt for.

Running a legitimate campaign across a multi-city ballot

Compliant here means whatever bestofthemidwest.com's live page states for the active cycle, since that page outranks anything written in this guide the moment new terms post. Beyond that baseline, the practical work is matching effort to how the ballot is actually structured: one shared domain, several distinct city audiences.

Send real customers to the specific city listing, not a bare mention of "Best of the Midwest" with no link attached. A Jamestown business benefits from naming both its listing here and its separate presence in the Jamestown Sun's own Best of the Best ballot, since the two are related but not identical processes. A Fargo or Bismarck business running this campaign alongside CommunityVotes Fargo or CommunityVotes Bismarck is entering two separate ballots, not doubling up on one.

Fabricated accounts, bot traffic, or invented sponsorship claims put a business's standing at risk on any of these platforms, and word travels fast across North Dakota's smaller cities specifically. For the general mechanics behind an award-style push like this one, award vote campaigns covers ground that applies across all three confirmed cities. How online contest votes work lays out the baseline for a campaign like this, and is buying votes legal is worth reading before committing budget toward any single city's listing. For the rest of North Dakota's public-vote programs beyond business ballots, including the state's own sports fan-vote polls such as the North Dakota High School Player of the Year and North Dakota High School Athlete of the Week pages, start at the North Dakota contest hub.