Today, we are announcing the final results of the 2015 Best of the West contest.
Some of the results are different from what we had announced earlier.
The reason is that we learned after making those announcements that our judges had not seen a fourth of the entries because of an error in the processing of entries in our contest software.
We decided that the only fair way to handle this problem was to reopen the judging and ask our judges to review the entries that they had not seen and then determine how they measured up against the announced first-, second- and third-place winners.
Here is what happened:
• In 11 categories, the results remained unchanged.
• In 15 categories the results changed, with newly reviewed entries replacing the judges’ past choices for first, second or third place.
The final results are posted on our contest results page.
We’re sorry that the second round of judging pushed back the completion of the contest for weeks, but we believe that it was the right thing to do.
We decided that we would grant an honorable mention to anyone who was earlier announced as a first-, second- or third-place winner but fell out of the top three places once the judges reviewed the new entries.
We will be mailing out medallions to first-place winners and award certificates to all winners by mid-September.
We have never had anything like this happen in our contest, which has been operating since 1987.
We apologize to everyone who entered – and particularly to the announced winners whose results were revised downward once judges reviewed the new entries.
We are taking steps to prevent this mistake from happening again, and our software vendor is looking at additional safeguards.
We want to thank you for your support of our contest.
Aug. 20, 2015