Where We Are Now with the 2010 Swampies

As of this morning, the official nominees have been announced and voting has begun for 8 of the 10 categories in this year’s Swamplot Awards for Houston Real Estate: Favorite Houston Design ClichÃ©, Best Teardown, Parking Lot of the Year, Drive-Thru of the Year, Walmart of the Year, the Washington Ave Award, Most Improved Neighborhood, and the latest: Least Historic Neighborhood. Have you selected your favorites in each of those categories yet? Nominations closed for all categories at the end of last week. The official ballot for Neighborhood of the Year will be posted shortly; by the end of the day today, all categories will be open for your votes.

As we’ve mentioned, this year you’re allowed to vote up to 4 times for a nominee in each category — as long as you cast each vote in a category using a separate method: in a comment to the official ballot post, in an email to Swamplot, from Twitter, or in a wall post to Swamplot’s Facebook page. These rules give an obvious voting advantage to readers who really really want their favorite candidate to win, and who are persistent enough to help make it happen. But there are other ways of stretching your influence: Just let your friends know about the awards, and get them to vote too!

Even if the results in a particular category don’t matter to you much, please do vote and encourage your friends to vote too: The Swampies belong to you! More participation will make the results — which we’ll announce next week — a more accurate reflection of this city and the varying opinions of our readers. (Plus: The results will feature the best comments included by readers with their votes, so they’ll simply be more fun to read.)

If you can’t make all your voting decisions before the holiday, though, don’t sweat it. You’ll have a little bit of time after Christmas to get those last votes in: The polls will close at 5 pm on Monday, December 27th.