Best of Athens 2011

We’ve been doing The Athens NEWS Best of Athens Readers’ Choice Awards for so many years now that it runs like a well-oiled machine… albeit one that occasionally needs a tune-up in order to run properly.

In this, the Best of Athens’ 22^st year, we once again enjoyed healthy participation, with the 1,004 votes easily beating the 916 votes cast last year, and breaking the 990-vote record from the year before. Of the votes case this year, we found that 544 of the ballots met our criteria to be counted. The key components of that criteria included the individual answering at least 28 of the categories and providing valid and sufficient identification.

The Best of Athens link on our Facebook page this year evidently helped add to the vote total.

As we do every year, we caution our readers that the results are not scientific, so please don’t get all Snopes.com on us. However, the responses do provide a framework on which to hang the leanings, tendencies and trends of local popular opinion.

Like the past few years, we handled the whole 2011 contest electronically. Other than this aspect of the operation, though, this year’s Best of Athens worked pretty much the same as it did in all those years with paper ballots. The best thing about the all-online balloting is that it’s more difficult to cheat, though not impossible.

Fortunately, we’ve gotten pretty good at ferreting out bogus ballots, ones that cross the line between acceptable lobbying for votes and highly organized attempts to pre-determine winners in one or more categories.

As always, the 2011 Readers’ Choice Awards contest reveals much about how our readers perceive local people, businesses, issues and institutions. We thank our readers who devoted their valuable time to completing the ballots and returning them before the deadline.

Like in recent years, we did not count ballots that broke the rules or that were incomplete.