About Best of Pine Island

In the Pine Island Eagle’s Best of Pine Island readers’ choice awards, readers have the last word.

Residents look forward to voting in the Best of Pine Island contest to support their favorite local businesses, organizations, people and attractions. We’re proud to host it to recognize the places and people that make this region special.

Nominations & Voting

Readers can propose businesses, organizations and names for all of the categories. This keeps the contest fresh as new businesses and organizations come to the area and as existing ones change and grow. Readers vote to name the top businesses/individuals in each category.

Fair voting rules

Nominees/entrants are prohibited from soliciting votes by offering payments or exchange of value of any kind.

Voting is limited to one vote in each category per person per day.

Even though we require sign-ups, we recognize that some people, in their enthusiasm, may be tempted to vote several times using different email accounts. Please note that voting under multiple email accounts violates the rules.

We do have systems in place to detect fraudulent voting. When we see evidence of fraudulent voting, we may eliminate all suspect votes at our discretion. In extreme cases, we will remove entrants, as well.

Nomination guidelines

We reserve the right to disqualify a business or organization from a category that does not represent a significant focus of its activities.

Nominees must, in most categories, be open to the general public. That is, no restrictive membership organizations.

Application of our criteria is not an exact science. The Best of Pine Island team uses its best judgment; if you think we’ve made an error, please email advertising@breezenewspapers.com.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What are the key dates for 2025?

• Voting Period: June 4-20
• Winners announced: July 30

Q: I nominated my business, but I don’t see it showing up on the website in the list of nominees. Why is that?

If you’re looking at the site during the voting period and don’t see a business you nominated, fear not! In order for a nomination to show up on the site, we have to approve it manually. Because we receive thousands of nominations, we can get backlogged.

Q: Do I need to click a submit button to finalize my votes?

No, users do not need to click a submit button when done nominating/voting. Votes are recorded as soon as the vote buttons are clicked. If a user decides to change their vote, the change will take place as soon as the vote button next to a different business listing is clicked.

Q: How are the winners selected?

Winners are those that received most votes in their category.

Q: Why does this contest allow people to vote every day?

The Best of Pine Island contest allows daily voting—once per person per day per category—because daily voting rewards entrants with passionate supporters. With a single vote per person, entrants with the best name recognition have a distinct advantage, as some voters skim over categories and cast their votes casually. Name recognition is an important part of finding the Best of Pine Island, but we also want to reward the passionate loyalty some people have for their local favorites, which can be captured in daily voting.

Also: This contest is fundamentally about celebrating and supporting great area institutions by raising their profile and helping them gain new fans. With daily voting, the contest raises the visibility of those businesses and organizations that use it to reach out to new and existing customers to ask for their support, through advertising and through their own channels.