Seven Daysies: How Voting Works & How to Win

385,319 votes, one state. What that number actually means

Nineteen thousand voters. Three hundred eighty-five thousand, three hundred nineteen votes. That's the 2025 Seven Daysies in one line, and it's a real number Seven Days published, not a marketing estimate. For a poll confined to a single state of roughly 650,000 people, that turnout is not a formality; a category winner beat real competition.

Vermont doesn't have a lot of statewide media outlets running polls at this scale. Seven Days, the independent Burlington-based alt-weekly, is the one that does, and it has run the Daysies long enough to have a two-stage structure that most single-round readers' polls skip entirely.

The email gate is the part worth pausing on. It's not unlimited-refresh voting, so the 385,319 figure reflects roughly 20 votes per person on average, spread across dozens of categories rather than stacked on one. See the Vermont contest hub for how this compares to Vermont's other statewide fan-vote programs.

The category list reveals who this poll is actually for

Best Burger. Best Local Band. Best Place to Buy Weed. Those categories, alongside more conventional business ones, tell you something a chamber-of-commerce awards ballot never would: Seven Daysies is a reader-culture poll first, run by an alt-weekly, not a trade publication.

The category framing shapes who nominates

A downtown Burlington bar competing in "Best Local Band Venue" pulls a different crowd than a Rutland accountant would in a category built for professional services. Guessing the wrong lane in the spring write-in round costs a business the whole nomination window, not just a handful of votes, because Seven Days narrows each category independently before June.

For the general mechanics behind any award-style vote push, see award-style vote campaigns, and for a category built around restaurant and food-service recognition specifically, restaurant vote campaigns covers ground that overlaps with Seven Daysies' food and drink categories. A professional-services nominee running in a general business category instead can compare notes with best business of the year voting, which covers the same kind of statewide business-recognition ballot.

Plan backward from the June ballot, not forward from the spring write-in

Most campaigns fail at the gap, not the ballot. Spring write-in enthusiasm rarely survives untouched until June without a reminder, so treat the nomination round and the vote round as two separate mobilizations, not one continuous push.

A business that also runs a local best-of poll elsewhere in the year can compare timing notes with the general contest vote guide, though Seven Daysies' email cap means the volume tactics that work on an unlimited-vote poll don't translate directly here.

One email, one vote. Why that cap changes the whole strategy

19,000 voters. 385,319 votes. Do the arithmetic and each voter cast roughly 20 ballots on average, one per category they cared about, not one category refreshed 20 times. That's what an email-verified cap does to turnout math, and it's the opposite of a poll that lets a single device submit unlimited repeat votes.

Reach more people, not the same people harder

Because a single supporter can't meaningfully inflate one category's total by voting repeatedly, the entire strategy shifts toward reaching a wider circle of real people willing to spend two minutes confirming an email and voting once. A founder-led business where the owner's own visibility drives trust may benefit from the personal-brand vote outreach guide for framing reminders that mention a named principal alongside the ballot link.

Keep the message simple and repeated across both windows: category name, business name, direct link. A reminder that skips the category name makes a Seven Days reader do extra work at ballot.sevendaysvt.com, and most people close the tab rather than hunt for it.

Burlington and Brattleboro don't get separate ballots, and that's the point

Seven Daysies runs one statewide ballot, not regional editions. A Burlington bakery and a Brattleboro bakery land in the same Best Bakery category; there's no county-level bracket that softens the competition for a smaller market.

Chittenden County's population density means Burlington-area nominees start with a larger raw pool of potential voters in most categories. A Northeast Kingdom or Brattleboro business competing statewide is not disadvantaged by geography as much as by reach, so the fix is a wider ask, alumni networks, regional Facebook groups, customer email lists, not conceding the category to the bigger metro by default.

Across 100+ categories, only one number is ever printed for each

Seven Days doesn't release a per-category vote count for any of its 100+ Daysies categories, in any year. The only figures the organizer has published are the statewide 2025 totals, 19,000+ voters and 385,319 votes. Everything below that level, how many people voted Best Bakery specifically, how close the Best Local Band race ran, stays unpublished. Screenshots or reseller pages claiming otherwise are citing a number Seven Days never released.

That gap sets the bar for any claim tied to this program. A competitor's boast only holds up if it names the specific year and category as printed in "All the Best," because that's the one placement Seven Days actually stands behind. "Seven Daysies 2026 winner, Best Coffee Shop" clears that bar; "Vermont's favorite coffee shop" on its own does not, since nothing dated or sourced backs it. Before the August issue prints, "nominated" and "vote for us at ballot.sevendaysvt.com" are the only claims a campaign can make about its own standing in any of the 100+ categories. For the broader standard this rests on, see buying real votes versus fake ones, and for how the two-stage nomination-then-ballot structure compares to other online polls, how online contest votes work.