All ballots for the Montana Weblog Awards 2006 have been received and are now undergoing the officially mandated recount (I double check my work to make certain I didn't do anything stupid). I should post the results tomorrow.
However, I did want to present a few demographics and thoughts for your contemplation. There were a total of 49 ballots submitted, a rather substantial increase over the 28 from last year. Votes were cast from as far away as New Zealand and France. There were 4 ballots cast from persons who's location I couldn't identify, and 8 from bloggers or readers from other states. That left 37 ballots coming in from Montanans, with 25 of those coming from Montana bloggers.
This is only a well-founded guess, but the ballots submitted from out of state (and from those in-state by those who do not have blogs) appeared to be all in response to Montana bloggers who have a wide appeal beyond our borders, and advertised the awards to their readers. Most of those ballots were rather limited in the number of categories they voted in, and the number of websites that they voted for. There isn't more that I can state definitively, but it's pretty obvious that Mike, Sharon and a certain Sam from a certain creek have a very broad readership.
There were only 15 ballots that were designated 'full', with votes cast in all 14 categories. The break down among the 34 partial ballots is a lot harder to get a handle on. Some of those partial ballots only skipped one or two categories, where others were single-website or single-issue votes. There were 3 single-issue voters, people who voted for only one website in one category. To those of you who received votes from those folks, trust me, you got fans! There were 7 ballots from those who voted for only one website in multiple categories. The rest of the partials were very disparate in quantity of votes and focus of that voting.
Note this, however, most of the partial ballots focused far more on the cultural and creative categories than on the political. Surprisingly (at least to me) was that among those partials that did deal with the 5 political categories, very few of the ballots broke on partisan lines. With no more than 4 exceptions, people were willing to vote on left-leaning websites and right-leaning websites. I realize that this is my own bit of projection here, but it is my hope that Montanans tend to be more egalitarian in their reading than many other places.
Many of the people who added comments expressed the difficulty of choosing in some categories. I couldn't agree more, and the voting reflects that. We have some terrific websites in this here state, and anyone who was nominated for anything should be justifiably proud of the level of competition. I personally liked the nomination format used this year, simply because it set a standard of agreement that could be reached. Honestly, this felt a lot less like herding cats and a lot more like reviewing the best of the best.
To all who were nominated, congratulations! I extend that especially to the youngest websites on the ballot, sites like MOTTO and Pragmatic Revolt. To all who voted, I extend my sincerest thanks. I hope that you all appreciate the creativity and effort of the Montana webloggers, and continue to find the newest, brightest and best to read in the coming year.