Best of Las Vegas: How Voting Works & How to Win

Two 'Best Of' ballots share one Las Vegas Valley

Two ballots, one valley, the same three words leading the name. The Las Vegas Review-Journal runs Best of Las Vegas at votebolv.com, and the alt-weekly Las Vegas Weekly runs a separate program called Best of Vegas at lasvegasweekly.com. Confusing the two costs a business real time during a short voting window.

Scale is where they split hardest. The Review-Journal's ballot spans more than 500 categories and drew roughly 9.8 to 9.9 million votes across the 2022 and 2023 cycles combined, a total the paper itself markets as the largest Best-Of program in North America. Las Vegas Weekly's Best of Vegas runs a lighter roughly 100-plus categories, voted each spring with results landing in a summer issue rather than a year-round platform.

A business running both in the same year is funding two separate pushes toward two separate audiences: a daily newspaper's broad subscriber base against an alt-weekly's narrower, younger readership. Neither ballot substitutes for the other, and a supporter told simply to "vote for us on Best of Las Vegas" with no link attached could easily land on the wrong one.

What the largest Best-Of claim actually means for one business

Nine million, eight hundred thousand votes, at minimum. That is the floor of what the Review-Journal counted across the 2022 and 2023 Best of Las Vegas cycles combined, a total large enough that the paper markets the program as the largest Best-Of in North America. Whether that specific ranking has been checked against every other market's program nationwide is not part of the record reviewed here, but the underlying vote count is real and citable on its own.

Scale like that changes what a single business should expect. Run the arithmetic on 7,500 competing businesses across 500-plus categories in 2025 and it becomes clear a given business's real odds depend on how many competitors its specific category drew, not the metro-wide total. A five-nominee specialty category and a fifty-nominee Restaurants category are not the same contest wearing the same name.

What the 2025 numbers confirm, and what they don't

1,042 winners. 1,644 awards. Both figures come from the Review-Journal's own 2025 count, and both are real, but the gap between them is not explained anywhere in the sources reviewed for this page. It could reflect multiple placements inside a single category, a runner-up tier alongside an outright winner, or some other structure entirely. Nothing confirms which.

No specific business name, category winner, or exact vote total for an individual category appears in what's confirmed here either. That's a real limit worth stating plainly rather than covering over with a vague "top-rated" claim the public record doesn't actually back.

Precise citations hold up where vague ones don't. "Best of Las Vegas 2025, [category name]" is a claim a reader could go check on votebolv.com or bestoflasvegas.com. A bare "Las Vegas's best," attached to no year or category, is not, and it risks overstating something the Review-Journal never actually published in that form.

One address for nominating, one cap for voting

votebolv.com carries the whole mechanic: nominations first, then a voting round, both under one roof rather than split across a separate submission form and a separate ballot site. The rule that actually governs how the public votes is short. One vote per person, per category.

What the per-category cap allows

That cap resets for every category a person visits, not once across the whole 500-plus list. Someone can vote for a favorite taco spot, a favorite dentist, and a favorite gym in the same sitting, since Best of Las Vegas treats those as three separate votes rather than one attempt spread thin across all of them.

Promotion runs wider than the website itself. The Review-Journal backs Best of Las Vegas with print placements, digital advertising, and outdoor advertising, actual billboards and signage around the valley, not just a link buried on the paper's own homepage. That kind of spend is not the norm for a mid-size market's readers-choice program; most ballots lean on a site and a newsletter and stop there. The willingness to buy outdoor space for this specific program is part of why the vote totals run into the millions rather than the thousands.

Building real turnout across a valley this size

Henderson, North Las Vegas, Summerlin, and the Strip corridor itself are not one audience. A Henderson dental practice and a downtown restaurant catering to tourists pull votes from genuinely different pools of people, even though both compete somewhere inside the same 500-plus-category ballot.

Spring Valley and Paradise, dense unincorporated pockets that read as "Las Vegas" to most outsiders despite not sharing the city's actual municipal boundary, hold much of the valley's day-to-day service business: salons, gyms, repair shops. Enterprise, further south, and Boulder City, a genuinely separate small city thirty-odd miles out, both sit inside the metro's broader reach but carry smaller, tighter local networks where a direct ask tends to travel faster than a broad social post ever does.

What actually works stays unglamorous. Real customers, sent to the specific votebolv.com category page, reminded more than once across whatever window the current cycle allows, respecting the one-vote-per-person-per-category rule rather than routing around it. Fake accounts or bought engagement risk the kind of scrutiny a program printing outdoor advertising and counting millions of votes can afford to apply. Is buying votes legal is worth reading before committing budget to any Best of Las Vegas push, and how online contest votes work covers mechanics that carry over from one category to another here. For the general playbook behind an award-style push at this scale, award vote campaign planning is the closer match than a restaurant- or sport-specific guide.