Best of C-VILLE 2013: How Voting Works & How to Win

What Best of C-VILLE is and who runs it

Best of C-VILLE 2013 is the readers' choice ballot that C-VILLE Weekly, the alternative newspaper serving Charlottesville, Virginia, ran under the address c-ville.com/bestofc-ville2013/. The format is a readers' choice award: readers nominate favorite people, places and things around the city, a primary round narrows the field, and a public vote decides the winners. The organizer's press-association entry lists c-ville.com as a Virginia newspaper, and the ballot lives at c-ville.com itself, with no outside voting vendor in the middle, so the vote button, the ballot layout and any rules all sit under the publisher's control.

The 2013 page frames the program in two sentences that say most of what a supporter needs. Readers had nominated more than 480 favorite people, places and things in Charlottesville during the Best of C-VILLE Primaries, and the next job was to vote the best of the best into the winners' circle. That makes the mechanic a plain public vote, open to whoever reaches the ballot page.

For a business, a musician or a nonprofit named on the ballot, the practical meaning is simple: support is measured in public votes cast on the publisher's own site, and the newspaper, not a platform vendor, sets the terms. The essentials appear in one place in the table.

The dated record for Best of C-VILLE

The confirmed dates all belong to the 2013 edition. The nomination season ran May 4 to 27, after which the ballot page announced the finalists and told readers to vote now until midnight on Sunday, June 30. The results followed in print: Best of C-VILLE 2013 hit stands Tuesday, August 20. Those three dates give the shape of a full cycle, a nomination month, a June finalist vote and an August winners' issue.

Beyond 2013 the printed trail is thinner but the program is not a one-off. The organizer describes Best of C-VILLE as its annual readers' choice awards, and the ballot address has carried a live Best Of C-VILLE presence into the 2026 cycle, which puts 2026 alongside 2013 as confirmed edition years.

For cycles after 2013 the newspaper has not printed a nomination window, a category roster or any per-reader voting limit on the ballot; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. That gap matters for planning. A supporter who wants to time a push around the 2026 edition cannot read open and close dates in advance and has to go to the ballot itself. The same holds for the rules: nothing published states how often one reader may vote or who counts as eligible, so any strategy has to be built around the public-vote mechanic rather than around printed limits.

How a supporter votes in Best of C-VILLE today

Voting in Best of C-VILLE is deliberately plain. The 2013 ballot page on c-ville.com carried a single call to action, Click HERE to start voting, set under the finalists announcement. A supporter who reached the page clicked through, worked through the ballot and backed favorites before the printed close. No outside voting platform stands between the reader and the ballot; the vote happens on the newspaper's own site.

Because the publisher hosts the ballot itself, the details a voter cares about, whether an account is needed, whether the ballot can be revisited, how the categories are grouped, are whatever the live page shows in the current cycle. The 2013 page printed no account requirement and simply invited readers to vote, but later cycles may differ, and the ballot is the only authority on its own rules.

For the current edition the same path applies: reach the Best Of C-VILLE area of c-ville.com, open the ballot, and follow its prompts before the deadline it prints. What does not carry over from 2013 is the calendar. The June 30 midnight close belonged to that edition, and the current cycle's close date is not published ahead of time, so anyone planning support around a deadline needs to read it off the live ballot rather than assume the 2013 dates repeat.

Where Best of C-VILLE sits among Virginia's best-of ballots

Charlottesville supports more than one readers' choice ballot, and Best of C-VILLE is the one C-VILLE Weekly runs on its own domain. The same publisher also stands behind Best of Charlottesville, a separate program with its own page and its own ballot, so a business named in one is not automatically named in the other. The Daily Progress Charlottesville Readers' Choice is the city's other newspaper-anchored contest, run by the daily rather than the alt-weekly.

Wider afield in Virginia, the sibling set includes Best of Arlington, the Best of Coastal Virginia Magazine program on the coastal side of the state, and two BroadwayWorld awards, the BroadwayWorld Central Virginia Awards and the BroadwayWorld NOVA Awards, which apply the readers'-vote format to theater. Each one answers to a different publisher on a different calendar.

What separates Best of C-VILLE from all of them is the host. The ballot lives at c-ville.com under a program-specific path, bestofc-ville2013, rather than on a shared voting platform, and the results land in the newspaper's own Best of C-VILLE issue, which reached stands on Tuesday, August 20 in 2013. For a nominee deciding where to concentrate support, the choice among these programs is really a choice of audience: the alt-weekly's readers, the daily paper's readers, or the specialized Broadway audience each BroadwayWorld ballot serves.

Building support in a C-VILLE readers' ballot

Support in a Best of C-VILLE ballot comes down to turning out the people who already like the nominee. The mechanic is a public vote on the publisher's own site, so every vote a business gains has to be cast by a reader who reaches the ballot and clicks through. That favors direct appeals: a mention at the counter, a post on the business's own page, an email to customers, each naming the ballot and the deadline it prints.

C-VILLE Weekly has printed no rule covering outside help in this ballot, so the safe reading is the organizer's own framing, an annual readers' choice award decided by public support. General tactics that fit this kind of ballot are in our votes guide, the legal position is summarized at is buying votes legal, and award-specific purchase detail sits at buy award votes.