The Official Rules of Simply the Best competition can be found at the bottom of the ballot. (Scroll to the bottom and click on “Rules.” But here is a summary of some of the most important ones (without all the legalese).
No purchase necessary. You are not required to spend any money to participate in Simply the Best.
Your business must be within 60 miles of Harrisburg. We reserve the right to restrict the local winners to only persons whose primary business location is within a 60 mile radius of Harrisburg, PA.
Contest Entrants must be responsive. If a contest entrant is unreachable, or if that winner/nominee is unavailable for prize fulfillment, an alternate will be selected. We often ask people to fill out a brief form to confirm their acceptance. (This only becomes an issue if we feel a business is purposefully not responding.)
Contest Entrants must be a good representation. Anyone who we feel is not a good represtentation of Simply the Best or Harrisburg Magazine may be elimiated from the competition at any time. T
Contest Entrants may not use artificial or fraudulant means as an attempt to increase their chances at winning. In other words: NO CHEATING! Avoiding cheating is easy! Vote with one email address. Don’t attempt to use other email addresses to submit nominations/votes. Don’t let anyone else do the same. We will (and have) eliminated businesses for this reason. If you are eliminated, we may or may not notify you and we won’t provide you with details on why. (Sorry, we won’t tell you what you did that caught you!)
Harrisburg Magazine may make minor changes to the ballot in-between the nomination and voting periods provided these changes do not eliminate any of the top nominees.
- Usually, this means we may split a category. For example, “Pizza Parlor” may change to “East Pizza Parlor” and “West Pizza Parlor.” We do this with categories with a high number of nominees.
- Occassionally, we may split a category by other factors, provided that factor isn’t subjective or our opinion. This often happens with categories where geography won’t apply (like Food Trucks).
- We also may change the name of a category to better represent the nominees. For example, we had a new category called “Senior Services” where the top 5 nominees were all businesses that had to do with hearing. So, we renamed the category “Hearing Specialist.” This change happens very rarely.
Categories without at least four (4) nominees during the nomination period will be eliminated. Categories with only four nominees may also be eliminated if they don’t seem to be popular with readers (based on the number of nominations received).
