Stuff the ballot box

It's that time of year again. The Pinnacle Awards voting is under way - and this year the voting is exclusively online.

Most papers have some kind of what we call in the industry a "best of" contest. Basically we pick a bunch of categories and ask readers to write in what they think are the best of the best - best pizza, best sandwich, best chiropractor.

We re-started the Pinnacle Awards in 2007, after a few-year hiatus, and for the first year the editorial staff came up with a mix of categories. You can probably tell that from categories such as "best beach within 60 miles," "best place to make out" and "best way to get dangerous" - the dangerous category being a shout out to local skydiving and Hollister Hills.

As the lead tallier of the votes the first year, I quickly learned that all is fair in love, war and best of contests. We had bundles of newspapers go missing off our dock, just to have 25 copies show up, completed in the same handwriting. Some businesses kept a stack handy in their offices, lobbies or restaurants so that readers could vote for them. Business owners would drop off stacks of ballots that they collected at their stores. It was a pain in the butt to tally up all the votes - imagine an excel spread sheet 1,000 rows long. But it was exciting to see the numbers change as the voting went on. Some categories had a clear winner from the start, while others were neck and neck until the end.


When the results were in, we hailed the winners in the paper and columnist Dan Fitch picked his own best of categories in a very funny parody of the awards.


Last year, when we offered paper ballots and online voting, we tripled the submissions. I crunched numbers for hours and hours. I even enlisted a friend to write a program that would quickly sort the online submissions to make it easier to deal with the data. Finally we had the results of more than 600 ballots.


In our 2008 special section, we highlighted some of the winners and even selected our staff picks. We couldn't choose just one best burger, but The Elegant Touch won hands down for best cookie in the county.


This year some of the categories have changed - the advertisers picked 'em so out went some of our favorites such as "best beach" and "best place to make out." But the Pinnacle Awards is sure to be another fun edition at the end of October - though I am not sure what it will look like since I am in charge of designing it this year instead of just writing and editing it.


Voting is under way through Oct. 4 and we encourage readers to vote early and often. After all, they decide the fate of the winners. Will Round Table Pizza remain the top dog for the third year running? Will Progresso's Tamale Parlor hold on to its title as best Mexican? And of course, the coveted best burger slot has a few more competitors this year with the 19th Hole and Relax! Grillin' and Chillin', along with old standby's Maverick's, Running Rooster, A&W and more.