The first round of 2012 Best of Athens results...

We've been doing The Athens NEWS Best of Athens Readers' Choice awards for so many years now that it runs like a tuned-up Ferrari... hot, fast and nimble. Just like we like our... Well, never mind about that.

In this, the Best of Athens' 23^st year, we once again enjoyed healthy participation, with the 1,053 votes easily beating the 1,004 votes cast last year, which at the time was a record. Of the votes case this year, we found that 786 of the ballots met our criteria for being counted. That validation percentage of nearly 75 percent is much greater than we usually see with Best of Athens. Last year's rate for valid ballots was 59 percent.

While we appreciate the great response this year, we're mainly glad that you people finally decided to follow the damn rules! Seriously, nearly everybody abided by the key rules when filling out the BOA ballots – which is that they had to answer at least half of the general categories and provide sufficient identification.

The Best of Athens links and reminders on our Facebook page this year once again 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. (Whatever that means.)

Like the several 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 harder to cheat, though not impossible.

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.

Today we're including the results for the "People," "Places" and "Dining" categories. On Thursday, we'll continue with the results for the "Nightlife," "Miscellaneous," 'Commerce" and "Students Only" categories.

Thanks again for your help with our survey this year. – TS