Best in the PNW: How Voting Works & How to Win

944,000 votes, 298 categories, and an 84% jump in one year

votethepnw.com. That's where The Seattle Times runs Best in the PNW, and the 2025 numbers are large for a regional readers-choice ballot: 944,000 votes cast across 298 categories, an 84% increase over the year before. Do the division on those two published figures and the prior year works out to roughly 513,000 votes, a number this guide derives from the Times' own math rather than a separately confirmed count.

Scale like that changes what a single nomination actually means. So a business here isn't competing inside one city's ballot; it's one name among hundreds of thousands of votes spread across nearly 300 separate contests running at once.

What isn't published anywhere in the confirmed record: a category-by-category breakdown of that 944,000-vote total, a fixed close date, or a per-day cap. Rather than guess at any of the three, treat votethepnw.com as the live source, and see the Washington contests and fan votes hub for how this program sits next to the state's other readers-choice ballots.

One regional ballot instead of four separate city contests

Bellevue and the Eastside run their own contest. So does Clark County, close to the Oregon border and roughly 160 miles south of Seattle. Best in the PNW works differently by design: one ballot, run by The Seattle Times, that pulls Seattle, Tacoma, Bellevue, and Everett together rather than splitting each city into its own separate program.

That distinction matters for a business deciding where to put a limited campaign budget.

A Bellevue business, for instance, sits inside two different ballots at once: The Seattle Times' regional program here, and the Best of 425 guide's own Eastside-only contest. Neither cancels the other out, and a business chasing both needs two separate campaigns, not one shared link. Clark County works the other direction: it sits outside Best in the PNW's confirmed footprint entirely, so a Vancouver-area business should look to the Best of Clark County guide instead.

What votethepnw.com confirms about mechanics, and what it doesn't

298 categories, live at one address, active for 2026. That's the confirmed shape of the platform itself. What Best in the PNW's site does not spell out, at least not anywhere in the public record, is a fixed nomination window, an exact close date, or a per-day vote limit.

Why naming that gap beats guessing at it

A business planning a multi-week push needs a real calendar, not an assumed one borrowed from a different Seattle Times property or a prior year's memory. Absent a published date, the safer move is checking votethepnw.com directly before locking in a campaign's start and end.

The same caution applies to results. Before The Seattle Times actually publishes a winner, "nominated" is the accurate word, not "won." Award-style vote campaigns covers the general mechanics behind building turnout for a program like this one, and that guidance holds regardless of which of the 298 categories a business happens to sit in.

Seattle, Tacoma, Bellevue, and Everett are four different commercial identities

Capitol Hill's late-night strip, Ballard's brewery row, Fremont's small-shop core, West Seattle across the bridge: Seattle proper alone holds several distinct commercial identities before Tacoma, Bellevue, or Everett even enter the picture. Best in the PNW's 298 categories have to hold all of that at once.

Bellevue and the wider Eastside carry a tech-corridor economy that looks nothing like Tacoma's port-city mix of small manufacturers, restaurants, and legacy retail. Everett, anchored by its own industrial base well north of Seattle, is different again. None of these four cities compete on a size-adjusted or regionally split ballot here; a small Everett shop and a well-known Seattle institution land in the same 298-category pool, sorted only by whichever category actually fits.

That flat structure raises the stakes of picking the right category in the first place. A business that guesses wrong, or gets filed under a broader category than it should, ends up competing against businesses many times its size for no good reason.

Running a legitimate Best in the PNW push before 2026 closes

Real customers, the correct category-specific link, and a repeated reminder as the cycle moves along: that's the entire legitimate playbook for a 298-category ballot like this one. There's no shortcut around the fact that a supporter has to land on the right page among hundreds to actually cast a vote that counts.

A generic "vote for us on the Seattle Times" message, with no link attached, sends a supporter hunting through votethepnw.com alone. That's a bigger cost here than on a smaller ballot, simply because there are so many more wrong turns available. Facebook-based vote campaigns can help a business reach the audience it already has, pointed at the exact category page rather than the site's homepage.

Inflated claims before results post, or a "we won" message with no citation to back it up, carry real risk in a market where Seattle, Tacoma, Bellevue, and Everett's business and media circles overlap more than a business might expect. See how online contest votes work for the general mechanics behind a push like this, and is buying votes legal before committing any budget toward one of these 298 categories.