Cerro Gordo County Auditor’s Office has online tools to prepare you for general election

MASON CITY — We’re less than a month away from the November general election and Cerro Gordo County voters have a couple of tools to use to find information leading up to the election.

County Auditor Adam Wedmore says there’s a couple of places to go online to help people answer the most frequently asked questions.  “If they can navigate to our website or our Facebook page, they’ll find links to these two different databases. What they do is they use our voter registration information and our GIS tool will combine it with real estate records so people can actually type in their address or their last name and actually find where their house is, and from there it will pull up all their information about where they vote and their polling location. It can link their address and get them a map for that polling place as well. It also instantly pulls up their sample ballot, so a voter will be able to review that ahead of time and see exactly what’s going to be on their ballot for election day.”

Wedmore says having those “specific to the voter” sample ballots available online helps people better understand what to expect when they vote. “In Cerro Gordo County, we have 23 precincts and we have a total of 45 different ballot types for this election. This is a tool to make sure that voter  sees exactly their ballot style, so they see exactly who is going to be on their ballot and what races will be listed, and it gives them time ahead of time to research the candidates with those questions and they can use that sample ballot as kind of a worksheet if you will to figure out who they are going to vote for and what they are going to vote for ahead of time.”

While voters will not be able to request absentee ballots through these websites, Wedmore says a voter will be able to navigate to the right place to start the absentee ballot process.  “They cannot directly request an absentee ballot from those applications, however on our website and from those applications will be links to get to our website where voters can find out information about absentee voting, or they can also from our website fill in their name and address and the request of how many absentee ballot request forms they’d like, and we can mail them those request forms. That gives them the ability to fill those out, get those request forms to us, and then we can mail them an absentee ballot which absentee ballots will start going out in the mail on Wednesday, October 16th.”

Below are direct links to those websites:

Find Your Polling Place website

Cerro Gordo County Election Map