The HAT Awards is unique in San Diego because we look to the music community and
the public to help us recognize the main forces in local, independent music.
We don't have a panel of judges and we don't do politics - instead we let each artist's
merits speak for themselves.
The Official HAT Awards ballot is decided based on the following rules:
- After the polls close, we tally the total nominations for each artist in each category
and rank them by their total nominations to see where everyone stands.
- Starting in 2007, nominees are only elible for one award in each of the three tiers
and they are only eligible for a total of two out of the three tiers.
So, nominate wisely - blanketing our server with nominations for your best friend
is more likely to hurt than help their chances of winning the award that they deserve.
- Also starting in 2007, each category has strict criteria. Any nominations
for a performer that does not match our objective criteria will be omitted from
our calculations. For example, if you nominate a solo performer for Best Acoustic
Band then the nomination will be omitted because the nominee is not a "band".
We will honor your subjective viewpoint - "What is Americana anyway?" - but we will
be very diligent about cleansing our nomination pool of erroneous nominations.
Visit our categories page to learn more about
our categories and criteria.
- Once we have our nomination pool tightened up, we endeavor to accept the first 4-6
names including any ties that don't exceed 7 artists total. For example if
Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Eric Clapton are all tied for sixth place for Best
Performer then we would not include any of them on the ballot because it would force
the category to exceed 7 artists total. However, if only Jimi Hendrix and
Janis Joplin were tied for sixth place then we would include them both on the ballot
and we'd have 7 artists in that category.
- Now, the ballot is ready! We post it live for the world to see. Voting
for all categories is optional (meaning you can leave categories blank if you wish).
- Before a ballot is counted in the final results, each ballot must be verified against
an email address. After you submit your ballot, look for an email from us
with a link to verify your email. Please make sure that you don't lose your
verification email in a spam filter or junk mail folder! This verification
process is critical to the integrity of our voting system. By verifying only
one ballot against one email we greatly reduce the opportunity for any one person
or group of people to significantly affect our final results. If you do not
verify your ballot, your ballot will not be counted! If you don't recieve
a verification email but, you have submitted your ballot please email us at info@sandiegohatawards.com.