Burlington CommunityVotes: How Voting Works & How to Win

One ballot at burlington.communityvotes.com, two voting rounds, five confirmed categories

burlington.communityvotes.com is live for the 2025 cycle. That much is confirmed. This is a CommunityVotes readers-choice program, one market inside the wider Metroland Media network, and it moves a nominated business through three separate stages: nomination, a first voting round, and a second voting round that actually decides the category winner. Most single-round "best of" ballots skip that middle step.

Five categories are confirmed here: restaurant, salon, dentist, realtor, and contractor. Additional categories may run on the live ballot in a given year; these five are the ones this record can verify, so a business should check its own placement directly on the site rather than assume the category list stops at five.

An exact nomination window, a fixed close date for either round, and a per-voter cap all stayed out of reach while putting this page together. Inventing a number nobody has posted would mislead a business owner more than it would help, so burlington.communityvotes.com remains the one live source worth trusting for that cycle's actual dates. Vermont runs several readers-choice ballots side by side, and the Vermont contest hub lines up how they differ.

Two rounds is the detail that separates this ballot from its Vermont siblings

Vermont has more than one readers-choice program running at the same time, and mixing them up costs a business real momentum. Two others worth naming directly:

Why the second round is not a formality

A nominee that never survives Round 1 never reaches the vote that actually crowns a category. Easy to say, easy to ignore in practice, because Round 1 usually looks smaller and lower-stakes than the finale everyone remembers. Treat both rounds as equally load-bearing. Skipping outreach for Round 1, then scrambling once Round 2 opens, is the single most common way a Burlington entrant loses a race it could have won.

The general mechanics behind award-style pushes like this one are covered in award vote campaign planning, and businesses weighing a restaurant-category nomination specifically may find the restaurant vote campaign guide useful for pacing two rounds of reminders instead of one.

What each stage confirms, and what only the live site can answer

Metroland Media runs burlington.communityvotes.com as one market inside a wider network of city-specific CommunityVotes ballots, the same platform structure that shows up under the CommunityVotes name in other cities. What sets Burlington's version apart, as far as this page can confirm, is the two-round vote itself. A single round decides most comparable "best of" ballots in one pass; this one splits the decision across two separate public votes, which means a campaign has to plan for two peaks of activity, not one.

Fixed dates and a stated per-voter cap simply aren't part of the public record pulled together for this page. Anyone building a serious push should read the live rules on burlington.communityvotes.com the week nominations open, not rely on a prior cycle's memory of how the calendar ran.

Burlington, Winooski, and the rest of Chittenden County share one ballot

Downtown Burlington sits on Lake Champlain, and Church Street Marketplace is the closest thing the city has to a single commercial spine. But the businesses eligible for this ballot stretch well past that strip. South Burlington's Dorset Street retail corridor, Winooski's small, walkable downtown across the Winooski River, and Essex Junction's Five Corners intersection all feed nominees into the same category pages. None of them run a separate local heat.

Colchester along Route 7, Williston's cluster of big-box and chain retail, and Shelburne's tourist-driven stretch further south round out Chittenden County's commercial map. A dentist or a contractor in Williston competes against a downtown Burlington counterpart in the exact same category, since CommunityVotes groups by business type, not by town line. That matters more for realtors, dentists, and contractors, whose customer base is already regional, than for a neighborhood restaurant or salon that draws mostly from walking distance.

A downtown restaurant near Church Street benefits from foot traffic a South Burlington strip-mall competitor doesn't get for free. That doesn't decide the category. It just changes where the first wave of organic nominations tends to come from before any deliberate outreach starts.

Building a campaign around two rounds instead of one

Waiting until Round 2 to start asking customers to vote wastes the round that decides whether Round 2 happens at all. Real customers, asked directly, told the correct category, and given the specific burlington.communityvotes.com link rather than a vague "go vote for us," are what actually moves a nominee through Round 1.

Round 2 needs its own separate reminder. A supporter who voted once in Round 1 rarely comes back unprompted for Round 2, since the two stages are functionally two different actions on two different pages, not one vote that carries forward on its own.

No published per-voter cap means no confirmed ceiling to plan around. It also isn't an invitation to lean on bots or fabricated accounts. Metroland Media operates this ballot across a network of markets, and a flag in one market usually carries consequences a small business can't easily undo elsewhere. Read is buying votes legal before either round gets serious budget behind it, and let how online contest votes work fill in the broader playbook for a two-round push like this.