(Radio Iowa/KJAN) — Iowa’s Secretary of State says it’s important for people to vote in today’s (Tuesday) city and school board elections. The polls are open from 7-a.m. until 8-p.m. Local election results will be posted as soon as the results are available. They can be found online on the kjan.com News page, and our social media sites (Facebook & Twitter).

Secretary of State Paul Pate says city government is the most efficient and effective level of government.  “Who’s going to decide how to make sure your neighborhood is safe? How many policemen and where will they be? That’s local government,” Pate says. “You’re going to have a fire department that’s going to be there when you need them. When you talk about key things like streets, you make take them for granted today, but I guarantee if you ever have a trash problem, you’re going to call you your city government and want to know where it’s at.”

Especially in smaller communities, Pate says it only takes a handful of people to decide an election. “More local races are impacted by a smaller number of people than you can imagine. Ten to 20 people could push an election one way or the other,” Pate says. “So it doesn’t take having thousands, if you spend some time looking just looking at your phone contact list and making some calls, you could be the impacting force that got someone elected to one of these positions.”

Every year, there are local elections that are decided by single digits, or in the cases of a tie, a name being drawn out of a hat.  “We have many elections that are that close where you’re doing that, that are won and lost by 10 and 20 votes more than most candidates ever wanted to have happen. That’s here in Iowa and multiply that across the country,” he says. “Every vote counts, and we want to make it as simple and easy to vote as we can, and we’re going make it is hard as we can for people to cheat.”

Besides winning elections to the Iowa legislature and to two separate terms as Secretary of State, Pate won municipal elections in November 2001 and 2003 for mayor in Cedar Rapids.