Laramie's Best of the Best: How Voting Works & How to Win

A ballot that ends in a ballroom, not a webpage refresh

250 to 300 people. That's roughly how many winners and finalists filled the Hilton Garden Inn in October 2025 for Laramie's Best of the Best. Most readers-choice contests end with a quiet results page. This one ends with a room.

The Laramie Boomerang, part of Lee Enterprises' Wyoming News group, runs the ballot at wyomingnews.com/laramieboomerang/contests/readers_choice/. Nominations open first; voting follows on the resulting shortlist. What sets the format apart isn't the two-stage structure itself, plenty of best-of ballots do that, it's the banquet close. A business doesn't just see its name on a webpage. It gets a seat in a room with two hundred-plus other Albany County winners and finalists.

That banquet detail changes campaign timing more than most businesses expect. A win here isn't confirmed the moment online voting closes; it's confirmed on stage. See the Wyoming contest hub for how this compares to the state's other fan-vote programs.

142 categories means a college town votes on more than storefronts

Albany County is small. Laramie itself runs somewhere around 32,000 residents, and the University of Wyoming sits at the center of the local economy in a way that Casper or Cheyenne businesses don't have to plan around. That single fact, a public university anchoring the county's only sizable city, shapes which of the 142 categories draw the heaviest turnout and which don't.

The academic calendar is the real variable

A nightlife or late-night food category swells with student votes during the fall and spring semesters and goes quiet in July. A category built around families, home services, or long-tenured local businesses runs closer to flat year-round, since it leans on Laramie's non-student base rather than a population that turns over every four years. Guessing which pattern applies to a given category, before locking in a nomination-push timeline, matters more here than in a market without a university driving a third of the local population.

Rock River, Centennial, Bosler, and Tie Siding businesses compete on the same countywide ballot as anything downtown. Albany County's total population is small enough that a well-organized push from one of the smaller towns can carry real weight in its category, not just a rounding error against Laramie proper.

For the mechanics behind award-style ballots generally, see this award voting overview. Restaurants specifically, a category especially exposed to the student-population swing described above, can use the restaurant vote campaign guide for timing customer reminders across a two-stage structure like this one.

Five years running, and what that track record actually buys a business

The Laramie Boomerang brought the Best of the Best concept back in 2021 after a gap. The 2025 cycle marked five consecutive years, which is enough of a run that the ballot now has a reputation locally, not just a name.

A five-year streak matters for one practical reason: repeat nominees can build real language around it. "Finalist three years running" or "back-to-back winner" reads as earned once a business can point to the Boomerang's own published results for each of those specific years. A single win with no history behind it doesn't carry the same weight in a town where residents remember which businesses show up on the ballot year after year and which appear once and vanish.

No public winners archive exists here going back through every one of the five cycles, so treat any claim about a specific past year's category winner as unconfirmed until it's checked against the Boomerang's own coverage for that exact year. "Nominated" and "vote for us" are the safe, honest verbs before results post; "Best of the Best 2025 winner, Best Coffee Shop" only holds up once wyomingnews.com or the print edition has actually said so.

What separates this from Casper's statewide ballot and Cheyenne's own contest

Wyoming runs more than one best-of program, and mixing them up is the single most common mistake an Albany County business makes. Best of Wyoming, run by the Casper Star-Tribune at trib.com, covers the entire state across ten major population centers and more than 100 categories. Laramie's Best of the Best is narrower on purpose: Albany County only, 142 categories, one Lee Enterprises paper covering one county rather than the whole state.

A Laramie business can enter both. They don't share a nomination database, a results page, or a voting window, so a strong showing on one carries no automatic weight on the other. The banquet close is also specific to this ballot; Best of Wyoming's results post online without an equivalent in-person event. For the statewide picture, including how Cheyenne fits into the broader Wyoming News group ecosystem, see Best of Wyoming.

Where paid promotion helps, and where the banquet makes the line clearer

This is a public-tally readers-choice award, not a judged or committee-decided prize, so promotion that puts the nomination link in front of real Albany County customers is a legitimate use of a marketing budget. What isn't legitimate: fabricated accounts, scripted or automated voting against the Boomerang's own rules, or announcing a win before banquet night confirms it.

The banquet format actually makes the honesty line sharper than a purely online ballot does. Two hundred and fifty to three hundred people watch the results announced in the same room. Claiming a category win beforehand, based on guessed vote totals or a competitor's social post, risks a business standing up in that room having already overstated its own result in public. No promotion vendor, including us, can guarantee a category win here; the Boomerang's own tally and category competition decide that. Reach can be built. The banquet outcome can't be bought.

For general contest-vote mechanics beyond this page, see how online contest votes work, and for the underlying honesty standard behind any legitimate campaign, what a real vote actually requires. Wyoming supporters who also follow prep sports can compare mechanics against the Wyoming High School Athlete of the Week, a separate statewide fan-vote program. General contest legality questions are covered at is buying votes legal.