PORT ANGELES — Port Angeles won by 28 votes over Santa Barbara, Calif., and advanced to the second of five rounds in Outside magazine’s fifth annual Best Town Ever online contest.
When first-round voting closed at 8:59 p.m. Friday, the count was 13,032 for Port Angeles, or 50.05 percent, to 13,004, or 49.95 percent, for Santa Barbara.
Port Angeles now faces Bainbridge Island in Kitsap County in the second round. Bainbridge beat Ashland, Ore., to advance to the second round.
Voting is already underway between Port Angeles and Bainbridge. To vote, go to http://www.outsideonline.com/1972941/best-towns-2015
Each of the five rounds of voting lasts five days. They lead to a final showdown when only two towns will remain. The contest began May 4, and the winner will be announced on June 5.
The voting for Port Angeles was promoted heavily by members of the Revitalize Port Angeles Facebook page. The voting see-sawed all day after voting — acccording to the contest rules — was supposed to end at 8:59 a.m. Friday.
Realizing that was a typo and out of conformance with the other four rounds, Outside quietly changed the cutoff time for votes to 8:59 p.m.
If the balloting had stopped at 8:59 a.m., Port Angeles would have won by several hundred votes.
The Revitalize Facebook page was peppered with congratulations Friday night:
“WE WON!!! by only 28 votes, whew,” “There’s no stoppin” us now!!!,” “Yay for the underdogs!,” “That was intense, Bainbridge is going down.”
One woman wrote: “My students were voting on every computer at school, on their phones…. Good job, teens! [?][?] I say we need to be organized about the next round. Game plan??”
It was a tight race all week.
As of Wednesday afternoon, Port Angeles was leading Santa Barbara 50.49 percent, or 9,323 votes, to 49.51 percent, or 9,141 votes, in the first round.
Results of the first round narrowed the field of 64 towns to 32. Each of the rounds will cut the list in half, with pairs of towns in each contest.
Each voter supposedly gets one vote per round per matchup.
But online voters quickly found that it easy to vote multiple times, sometimes by switching browsers, sometimes by other Internet tricks.
Those who vote in each round will be eligible for prizes, Outside said, and supposedly multiple votes were disqualified — though there was little evidence of this in the first round.
Outside magazine said in its introduction for the contest:
“Vote for America’s Best Town! One of these 64 towns can be called the ‘Best Town Ever.’ Crowning the winner will be up to you.
“Picking the [entries] in our fifth annual Best Town Ever contest wasn’t easy. We looked for places with great access to trails and public lands, thriving restaurants and neighborhoods, and, of course, a good beer scene—all while excluding the winners and runners-up from the past three years to make room for hidden gems, underdogs, and towns on the rise.”
The Port Angeles Regional Chamber of Commerce wasn’t notified of the entry and learned about it on a Facebook post, said Charlie Comstock, member services manager for the chamber, on Wednesday.
“I was blown away. Right now, we’re ahead of Santa Barbara,” Comstock said.
PA’s advantages
Santa Barbara is a much larger city and better known, he said Wednesday, but Port Angeles has a couple of advantages in this contest.
“It’s a different audience,” he said.
Comstock said he believes the current severe drought in Southern California and that area’s more crowded conditions make Port Angeles appealing to those who appreciate travel, fitness and recreation.
Bainbridge vs. PA?
Assuming Port Angeles would go up against Bainbridge, Comstock said it will come down to which resource people value more — Port Angeles’ access to Pacific Ocean beaches and Olympic National Park, or Bainbridge Island’s wooded island trails and access to Seattle resources.
Port Angeles was nominated for a wild-card round by Instagram users and selected in the wild-card round for entry to the contest.
Other successful wild-card selectees were New York City; Saugatuck, Mich.; and Roanoke, Va.
Towns were divided by regions — East, West, Midwest and South — then organized into traditional competition brackets.
The first round included large cities like New York City; Las Vegas; Birmingham, Ala.; and Detroit and small towns like Whitefish, Mont.; Spearfish, S.D.; Beaufort, S.C.; and Lake Placid, N.Y.
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Reporter Arwyn Rice can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5070, or at arice@peninsuladailynews.com.
