We’ve Opened Up Our Central Track Music Honors Ballot To Write-In Candidates And Removed The Requirement That Made Voters Cast Answers In Every Category.

You wanna know why more people don’t throw music awards? Because it’s a tough business!

Now, don’t get us wrong: We’ve known for some time now what we were getting into by throwing our first-ever Central Track Music Honors this year. We knew it was going to be a major undertaking, that it would involve hard work and that doing it right would mean being open to ideas outside of our own.

To that end, we’d like to announce three changes we’ve quietly made to the Central Track Music Honors voting process over course of the first week of voting for this event.

First up, in the spirit of inclusion and community-building that we’ve been hyping up since we first announced this thing, we’ve opened up our ballots to include write-in fields in every category. Now, in addition to our seven suggested nominees in each of the ballot’s 51 honors categories, you can feel free to write in an additional candidate that you think is also deserving of recognition. (Frankly, this decision is as much a concession to our having missed some qualified nominees in building this ballot as it is an admission that our editorial staff, which put this ballot together, is by no means the sole determining factor in whether someone is worthy of being honored among their peers.)

Secondly, we have worked with the developers of our polling software to remove the requirement that forced voters to submit an answer in every category in order for their ballots to be accepted. We never intended for that to be the case, and are excited to have it changed. It’s not fair to expect every voter in our Music Honors to be intimately familiar with all 293 acts nominated on the ballot, and we don’t want to discourage someone who has an opinion on, say, the Best Country Act category from participating in this process simply because they don’t have an opinion on the Best Club DJ honors. We also don’t want them just picking an answer at random to satisfy the submission requirements. This change, we believe, opens the process up to a far greater pool of perspectives on the Dallas music scene.

Lastly, we’ve added a page into our system that confirms to voters that their completed ballot has been received. This is a small, but important, change. Previously, voters just had to act in good faith that our system had received their entry when their page refreshed (which we can say for a fact it was even thought it didn’t explicitly say so); now, they’ll be taken to a page that outwardly verifies that their ballot has been entered into our system.

It’s possible we could make additional changes to the ballot in the future, but our hope is that these changes address the most pressing concerns surrounding our voting process. We appreciate your patience and understanding in bringing them to pass.

Remember, voting in the 2019 Central Track Music Honors runs through midnight on Wednesday, February 13. If you’ve already voted, feel free to keep doing so — up to five times total throughout the balloting period, and once every 24 hours.

If you haven’t yet voted, you can do so right here.

Beyond that, just stay tuned! In the coming days, we expect to have more information to share with you about our big Central Track Music Honors event taking place on Wednesday, February 20, at the Granada Theater. And, honestly, we can’t wait.

Here’s to Dallas music!

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