Your voice. A fair vote.

Best of the VI celebrates local businesses through annual community voting. Check the season page for the current phase and deadline, shown in Atlantic Standard Time.

Nominations & eligibility

Sign in and verify your email to suggest a real business operating in the selected island group. An optional business website or social link helps reviewers confirm it. For Best Local Dish, name the dish and the business serving it. Nominations are reviewed before appearing on the ballot. Exact duplicates are combined; the awards team can merge other duplicates.

The BVI is one voting group for this feature. St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix each have their own ballots. “All” is a browsing filter, not a separate voting region.

One choice per ballot

You may hold one vote in each category, island group, and season. Voting for another nominee on the same ballot replaces your previous choice. Changes stop at the published deadline. Sign-in and email verification are required; known disposable email domains are blocked. Do not create multiple accounts to obtain additional votes.

Independent results

Vote counts are hidden during voting. After the deadline and activity review, an administrator publishes a frozen results snapshot. The highest eligible vote count wins; second and third places are finalists. Equal totals share a rank (for example, two first-place winners followed by third place). A nominee with no eligible votes receives no award. Removed nominees and disabled categories are excluded from publication.

Sponsorships, paid placements, badges, and winner perks never add votes, alter ranking, or break a tie. Sponsors are labeled separately from nominees. Winner perks are subject to confirmation by the awards team and are not a guaranteed cash prize.

Abuse review

We limit submission rates and flag unusual voting spikes. A shared network or popular campaign is not automatically invalid. The awards team reviews flagged activity before publishing results. A blocked voting identity’s ballots are excluded, with an administrative audit record. Published seasons cannot be reopened or manually reordered.

Privacy

Your email is not displayed with your vote. Voting uses a hashed, normalized email identity so duplicate sign-in methods and common email aliases cannot add another ballot. We store choices, verification status, submission timestamps, and daily network hashes for abuse review. Account emails remain governed by the existing account system; winner-perk inquiries include your contact email so staff can respond.

Published results show nominee names and eligible vote totals, never individual voters. Authorized administrators can inspect hashed voting activity and export results. Awards records are retained to operate the season, investigate abuse, and preserve the annual results archive. Images supplied for nominees must be appropriate business images that the submitter or administrator has permission to use.

Questions or corrections

Contact the WelcomeToVI team through the existing partnership contact page and identify the season, category, island, and nominee. Please raise eligibility or duplicate concerns before results are published.