Best in the World: How Voting Works & How to Win

164,068 votes, 150+ categories, and a nomination stage most entrants skip

Tulsa World doesn't run one ballot. It runs a nomination round first, then narrows every one of its 150+ categories down to a public vote, and the 2025 cycle closed with 164,068 total votes cast across the whole program. Skip the nomination stage and there's nothing to campaign for once the public vote opens on July 16, regardless of how loyal a customer base is.

That two-step structure is easy to miss if a business or nominee only checks the page once voting is already live. By then the ballot for that category is fixed; the names on it cleared a filter weeks earlier that most casual readers never saw happen.

Fourteen sections for 150-plus categories works out to roughly ten or eleven categories a section, on average, though the actual split isn't even, dining alone almost certainly carries more categories than pets. That's a structural choice, not an accident: it keeps a narrow category (say, a specific home-services subtype) from getting buried under the highest-traffic sections like dining. See the Oklahoma contest hub for how this compares to the state's other readers-choice programs.

Fourteen sections means fourteen different audiences, not one popularity contest

Automotive. Dining. Healthcare. Home and garden. Shopping. Services. People of the year. Pets. Those eight alone cover wildly different reader habits, and Tulsa World runs several more sections beyond them on the live ballot.

The category a business picks decides more than the vote count does

A home-services contractor and a healthcare provider both technically serve "the community," but they don't compete for the same attention. A nominee entered under the wrong section, or the wrong category within a section, is fighting a crowd that was never going to recognize the name in the first place. Getting the category right matters more here than in a single flat ballot, because the wrong category means competing against names with no shared audience at all.

For the broader mechanics of running any award-style vote push, award-style vote campaigns covers ground that carries over here, and a restaurant nominee specifically will find more direct overlap in the restaurant vote campaign guide.

Plan from August 3 backward, not from the nomination date forward

Most of the actual work happens before July 16. That single mental flip, planning backward from the vote close instead of forward from whenever nominations happened to open, changes how a campaign gets staffed.

A business used to a single-stage local poll can treat the nomination window as an afterthought. It isn't. Half the 164,068-vote total in 2025 was already decided by which names made each ballot; a nominee that never appears on the public vote never gets a share of that number at all. A named principal or founder up for People of the Year should plan the same way, and our fan-poll vote outreach guide covers reminder timing that carries over to a personal-brand nomination inside a business-focused ballot like this one.

Tulsa and Oklahoma City each run their own program, and the two don't overlap

Best in the World covers the Tulsa World's Oklahoma readership. Oklahoma City runs a separate, much older readers-choice contest, Best of OKC, through the Oklahoma Gazette, with its own ballot, its own category list, and its own results page. A business operating storefronts in both metro areas is really running two unrelated campaigns, not one program with two names.

None of that means Tulsa suburbs compete against each other on the ballot. Categories, not cities, decide who's on the same page. A Broken Arrow home-services company and a Bixby home-services company can land in the identical category; a Sapulpa auto shop and a Jenks restaurant never will, section boundaries keep them apart entirely. Businesses that also chase consumer recognition further east can compare notes with Best of New Jersey, which runs a similar nominate-then-vote structure through a different regional publisher.

What Tulsa World doesn't publish, and the one program people confuse this with

No public breakdown exists showing how the 164,068-vote 2025 total split across the 150+ categories, or which individual names won which category that year. That's not a hole in this guide; it's the actual state of what's published. Old screenshots and reseller pages sometimes circulate claims that don't survive a check against the current contest page.

The more common mix-up is a different Tulsa World program entirely. The Tulsa World Bill Knight Automotive HS Football Player of the Week is a sports-only weekly fan vote with a Tuesday 3 p.m. CT close, run by the same publisher on a completely different page. Best in the World shares nothing with it beyond the Tulsa World name; a category, a section, and a results page for one has zero bearing on the other.

Before results post, "nominated" and "vote for us" are the only claims that hold up. See what a real vote actually means for the underlying standard behind any legitimate campaign, and how online contest votes work for the general mechanics a two-stage program like this one builds on.