Some assorted thoughts on this, our annual Best of Northern Nevada issue …
• Thanks to everyone who took the time to vote in our annual readers’ poll. I realize that facing down a ballot with nearly 230 categories can be daunting—yet every year, thousands of you take the time to vote. You’re awesome, and I thank you.
• To those of you who feel compelled to complain—to RN&R staffers, on social media, wherever—about the results of this readers’ poll … just don’t. Really.
If you don’t like some of the results, well, I don’t either. I think In-N-Out Burger is just fine, but there are a lot of far better places in Northern Nevada to get burgers or cheap eats, in my humble opinion.
But that’s the thing about the Best of Northern Nevada poll: Staff picks aside, the RN&R doesn’t decide on the slate of the finalists and the winners; our readers do. We RN&R folks just run the contest and publish the results.
• That said: We do put up guardrails in the form of rules—like requiring email verification and asking people to vote only once per round—and fraud checks, in order to make the poll as fair and meaningful as possible.
Regarding fraud checks: I’ve been doing Best Of readers’ polls now for a quarter-century, and this year, we dealt with one of the biggest ballot-box-stuffing attempts I’ve ever seen … and the attempt, while impressive in its scope, was executed rather poorly.
Our balloting system tracks the IP addresses of voters, and logs when more than one ballot is submitted from an IP address. There can be perfectly legitimate reasons for multiple ballots coming from one IP address … but not, as we saw this year, 315 ballots, all with email addresses from the same foreign domain, all with votes for just one business.
All told, we found 700 fake ballots cast on behalf of that business. (Ironically, those votes would not have been counted anyway according to our rules, because they didn’t meet the 10-category-vote minimum.) When we reached out to the business to ask what was going on, management claimed they had no idea about the fraud efforts. It’s plausible that a competitor could have submitted the fake ballots in an effort to get the business thrown out of the competition, or that the fake ballots were submitted by a rogue employee without management/ownership permission, so we will refrain from revealing anything else.
To anyone out there who is tempted to game the system in the future … don’t. It almost certainly won’t work.
• We do the BONN poll for three reasons: 1. People really, really enjoy it and learn about great new businesses, organizations and professionals. 2. Winners and finalists enjoy the recognition, which, in most cases, is much-deserved. 3. The extra advertising in the issue pays for a whole lot of our other coverage. The RN&R publishes at a loss 10 or 11 months out of the year; the Best of Northern Nevada issue helps us fill in most of those financial gaps.
• Finally, a note about the artist who did this year’s Best of Northern Nevada illustrations, Nathaniel Benjamin.
These illustrations, in a way, have been four years in the making: In early 2020, he was hired by the RN&R to do that year’s BONN. Well … then came the pandemic, and the former owners shut both down the print edition and the readers’ poll in 2020 and 2021.
When my company took over the RN&R in January 2022, we resolved to rebuild the publication by bringing back writers, adding content, rebuilding the website, returning to print (as a monthly) and relaunching the Best of Northern Nevada readers’ poll and issue. We did all of that, producing great BONN issues in 2022 and 2023.
However, I didn’t know about Nathaniel’s agreement to do the art in 2020. Fortunately, Kris Vagner, who became the RN&R’s managing editor just after we published last year’s BONN issue, did know about it. When we started discussing this year’s BONN plans months ago, and we decided to bring back our tradition of hiring talented local artists to do the illustrations, Kris suggested reaching out to Nathaniel—and I am glad I did.
You can learn more about Nathaniel Benjamin in this month’s 15 Minutes interview, on Page 59.