Who’s the best? We are.

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

We did it again. Or rather, you did: The Biggest Little Best of Northern Nevada. Near as I can tell, we have about the usual number of weird results. Still, I think, in general, this year has the most accurate—in that I agree with them—results ever.

Part of that is we had fewer registered voters than last year, about 2,700 total. That is primarily due to a less intense effort on the part of one casino to get out the votes. We’ve recognized in the past the effect the massive marketing departments have on our little contest, and over the years, we’ve actually adjusted things so that the casinos were only competing with each other. Still, having tourists voting tended to skew some of the results in areas outside of Casinos & Gambling.

Another thing worthy of note is that we didn’t have the botnet attacks that we had last year. In fact, as far as I know, we didn’t have to kick out any ballots for cheating. The biggest factor that got ballots removed is that people didn’t vote in 10 categories, which, judging from the social media campaigns I was watching, is because people didn’t tell people to vote in 10 categories. The instruction was right there on the launch page, but, well, you know how people can be.

So, while there were some hitches, it was very smooth this year. A lot of that is due to our operations department, particularly John Bisignano. And Deborah Redmond helped me with Excel. You know you work for a good company when one of the owners gets right in to make things run smoothly. Thanks to those two.

Also, special thanks to Hayley Doshay, our art director for this project. She kicks ass. And thanks to Ron Rash for doing our iconographic original art. Finally, thanks to all the designers, salespeople, office and editorial staff (who came in to work on Saturday to tally results). You folks are the reason there is only one Best Of that matters in Northern Nevada.