Best of Santa Barbara® 2025 Ballot How-To

When you go to put in your first nomination or when you hit the “start” button on bestof.independent.com, you’ll be asked to sign in using a google account or email so the website can track your progress on the ballot.

If it’s your first time visiting the website, you’ll be asked to fill some basic information with your email including your name and postal code. You can also sign up for any of our newsletters during this process.

If you’ve already registered your email, you’ll be taken directly to the ballot.

You can click “start” on the home page of the ballot, or you can select any section to begin.

The nomination round is write-in so you’ll need to know the name of the business you’d like to nominate in each category. If you don’t have a nomination to send in for a particular category, you can skip to the next one.

The website will keep track of your nominations in the top right hand corner under your registered email. For your nominations to count, you’ll need to nominate in at least 20 categories.

You can click on “votes history” to see the last category you nominated in or edit your choices in each category. You can change your answers or edit them anytime before July 2.

When you’re in a section, you can use the browse tab to see each category in that group and easily navigate to the next category or change to a different section.

On each category, there is a button that says “Register Your Business.” If you are a business owner in town, we encourage you to click this button and fill in your information. This is only shared with the Santa Barbara Independent and is used to make sure your business name and additional information is correct once the voting round begins.

As a business owner, you can help up make sure all of your nominations are labeled correctly, and you can enter “nicknames” or variations of your business so our website will recognize your business even if reader’s don’t write-in your official business name.