The 2014 Houston Culinary Awards season officially opens today!

Houstonculinaryawards.com went live this morning at 12:01 am, and ticket sales and voting are both now under way.

Some news about the voting: In an effort to keep the process as honest as possible, we have made a small change. This year, you’ll need a Facebook account in order to vote online for the Houston Culinary Awards finalists. It’s not because we have any special love for Facebook. It’s to help eliminate fraud. (No Facebook account? We will provide an alternate method for you.) Read on for why we’ve made these changes and how you can vote even if you don’t “do” Facebook.

The voting rule is this: one ballot per person and no “stuffing” of the virtual ballot box. Over the past two years, one of my jobs as a My Table magazine contributor, HCA committee member and co-owner of Revolution Collaborative (an IT firm) is to sift through thousands of votes after voting closes to eliminate the obviously fraudulent ones. It takes an entire weekend to effectively do it, but we want the winners to be honestly chosen by the general public.

The seven finalists in each of the 25 HCA categories are picked by a committee of about 20 people – a mix of food writers, awards sponsor and others who are intimately involved with Houston’s restaurant industry (but who do not actually work for restaurants). The winners, though, are supposed to be picked by the voting public.

The first year I did the screening, I kept my eyes open for duplicate email addresses, suspicious activity from the same IP addresses (keeping in mind that households and companies have multiple legitimate voters) and downright fraudulent email address. (No, I don’t think 1@gmail.com, 2@gmail.com, etc. are legit email addresses.) Last year, I eliminated people’s ability to use an identical email address more than once. But that still wasn’t good enough.

There’s been one thing I wasn’t able to entirely screen for: fake email addresses. Since you could pretty much plug anything into the address field in the voting form, a well-crafted fake email address could potentially escape my notice (although, combined with reviewing IP address screening and time stamps, a bunch of them didn’t).

This year, we brought in a local Houston programmer to develop a customized voting application that would eliminate this kind of fraud, thus closing the circle. He strongly recommended Facebook authentication, so that’s what we’re going with.

If you don’t have a Facebook account, don’t worry: You can download a ballot and submit it electronically to us or even print one out and mail it to us at My Table magazine, 1733 Harold Street, Houston, TX 77098. Note that we will be verifying return addresses and email addresses for ballots submitted with the alternate methods. Click here for a downloadable ballot via PDF. Please email it back to Phaedra.Cook@att.net.

We want the Houston Culinary Awards to be selected in the most ethical manner possible and the awards to be a legitimate barometer of what Houston is eating, drinking and thinking. Facebook authentication seems to be the best way to go about it this year. We put a lot of work into hosting the awards program and dinner every year and take the voting seriously.

We expect there will be questions and comments and welcome your input. You can email info@my-table.com or send those to me directly at Phaedra.cook@att.net. Thanks, and we look forward to your votes!