Best businesses? You tell us

Best of North Idaho is just a newspaper-sponsored popularity contest.

True or false?

Best of North Idaho is an excellent gauge for people to judge the very best businesses in the region.

True or false?

In our view, the answer to both questions depends. It depends on you.

The contest takes place during the month of January each year, so you can go right now to www.nibjbestof.com and vote. There are more than 100 categories, and you can vote in as many or as few as you like. But the more thought you put into your votes, the more useful the contest will be for businesses and potential customers alike.

Creators of the contest at North Idaho Business Journal have taken great care not to introduce bias into the process. For instance, when you go to nibjbestof.com and sign in, you're given categories but not choices within those categories. The idea is that by giving you a category and then letting you name the business of your choice for that category, you have to do a little more thinking, but the results will be more meaningful than if this is a simple multiple choice test.

Last year, 53,420 valid votes were cast. We say "valid" because thousands of fraudulent votes were detected and thrown out. North Idaho Business Journal employs excellent technology and several proven practices to weed out bogus votes or multiple votes cast by one source. When you go to www.nibjbestof.com to vote, you can only vote once in any category. Between now and midnight Jan. 31, you can go back as many times as you wish to work on your ballot, but you can only cast that ballot once.

Those are the ground rules and the primary reasons we feel strongly that when you pick up the Best of North Idaho special section in March, you can trust that the businesses named the best in every category really are great businesses. That's because you picked them.

Problems?

If you have problems voting, email malexander@cdapress.com.