Erie Reader Best of Erie: How Voting Works & How to Win

Two rounds, not one: how a nomination becomes a finalist

A single fact separates Best of Erie from a typical readers' poll: nothing gets decided in round one. Erie Reader opens a nomination period where readers submit business names by category, then narrows that list down to five finalists per category before the vote that actually matters even opens.

Miss that structure and a campaign wastes its energy. A business can generate a wave of nomination support and still lose everything if it doesn't survive into the top 5, because the nomination count itself isn't the scoreboard.

What the 2025 relaunch changed, and what still isn't public

Erie Reader relaunched Best of Erie's voting process with updates in 2025. That much is confirmed. What exactly changed from whatever ran before it isn't detailed in the record available for this page, and guessing at the prior format would only mislead a business planning its next campaign.

Why that gap matters more than it looks

A business that competed in an older cycle and assumes the same rules apply now is the most likely person to get caught off guard. The safe move is treating eriereader.com's current-year page as the only authority, not a memory of how the contest used to run.

The nomination-to-final-vote mechanics

Two separate audiences have to show up for a business to win: the people who nominate it into the top 5, and the (often overlapping but not identical) people who come back for the final round. Treating them as one push under one deadline is the most common mistake.

Why Erie County's geography shapes who actually competes

Erie itself anchors the county, but Millcreek Township sits right against the city and carries a significant share of the area's retail and dining traffic. Harborcreek, Fairview, Girard, North East, and Waterford round out the county's other commercial pockets, each with its own customer base that doesn't automatically cross into city-proper businesses' orbit.

A restaurant in North East and a restaurant in downtown Erie compete in the same category if Best of Erie groups by category rather than by township, so a nomination push has to reach past a business's immediate neighborhood to matter across the whole county's readership.

Further out, Summit Township and the smaller borough of McKean sit closer to the county's rural edge, and a business there draws a noticeably different customer base than one on Erie's Peach Street commercial strip. Union City, tucked near the Crawford County line, is arguably the furthest thing from a downtown Erie storefront on this same ballot, and yet the two compete head to head once a category is set. That spread is worth remembering before assuming a nomination surge from one part of the county tells the whole story.

Running an honest campaign across two separate deadlines

Because the nomination round and the final vote run on different schedules, a business needs two reminders, not one. Ask customers to nominate by name first; once finalist status is confirmed, go back to that same list and ask again for the deciding round. Skipping the second ask is how a strong nomination push quietly fails to convert.

For the broader mechanics of running any readers'-choice campaign the right way, see how online contest votes work and award-style vote campaigns. Before committing budget to either round, is buying votes legal is worth reading against Erie Reader's own, unpublished rules for this specific relaunch.