What is My Municipality and How to Find It

Determine municipality for absentee and mail-in ballots

“What is my municipality?” is the most often asked question of USgeocoder by callers trying to fill out their absentee/mail-in ballots. This blog is to help campaign and election advocacy organizations’ members and volunteers correctly answer this question. With this post, Let’s start with, “What is a municipality?”

What is a Municipality?

First a municipality, with exceptions to follow, is either a city, town, village, or borough. Generally, a municipality, is created either by being chartered by an act of the state legislature or incorporated. It has a governing body such as a city or town council, board of aldermen, board of select people, or city commission; and may have a chief executive that may be a mayor, council chair, or manager.

A town’s land use ordnances, when in conflict with a county ordnance, usurps the county ordnance because the jurisdiction of the county stops at the municipal boarder.

The most blatant exception to this rule is in Wisconsin, where towns are not incorporated and function as townships do in other states. That is, in Wisconsin “towns” are unincorporated areas of a county that carry out some or all of the functions of county government. This can be very confusing because Wisconsin also has “incorporated towns” which may also be called cities or villages. Hence, in Wisconsin you can distinguish between a municipality which is actually a town from a town that is actually just a township by looking for the word Incorporated in the official name of the town. Incorporated towns are towns like the rest of the US. If there is no “incorporated” in the name, it is a township.

To make things more confusing, in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, townships are incorporated and classified into Cities, Towns, villages, boroughs, or townships. But all these are incorporated, so they are municipalities. The US Census bureau describes New England cities and towns as both incorporated municipalities and townships. This is because the Census bureau classifies municipalities both by type of creation and by whether the municipality also functions as an extension of county government, or as the only local government because there is no county government. For instance, Rhode Island and Connecticut have abolished their counties. Thus, municipalities in those states carry on all local government functions, including function usually provided by counties such as public health and welfare services.

Not to be outdone by the Northeast states, South Dakota calls their townships, “towns”.

Minnesota confuses things even more. Traditionally town and township has been used interchangeably in Minnesota law for over a hundred years. Since the 1970’s, city is the correct term for an incorporated organized government, and an unincorporated area is a “town” even if it has an organized government. To help ease the confusion, if you see home rule or charter applied to a local government in Minnesota, it is a city. But when you consult the Minnesota statutes, townships are the local form of government for 96% of the landmass of Michigan, and they may be chartered or unchartered. Consult https://www.legislature.mi.gov/(S(qeu5nljqnmo2hbok4dpvzpgy))/mileg.aspx?page=getObject&objectName=mcl-Act-359-of-1947 and https://www.house.mn.gov/hrd/pubs/ss/sslgterms.pdf.

How to find municipality?

I hear you saying, “There must be an easier way than memorizing this confusion correctly before answering voters’ questions!” There is. USgeocoder provides an online lookup tool that is free for occasional use. Next time when you receive the question “What is my municipality?”, you can direct your callers to USgeocoder.com’s live demo and instruct them to enter their house number, street name, and zip code into the “Live Demo”. When the map comes up, tell the caller to click on the “+” sign to the left of “Districts and elected officials”, then scroll way down till they find “Municipality”. It will say either the name of the municipality or “unincorporated”. If it says “unincorporated”, that means their address is not in a municipality. Your organization can use our USgeocoder.com’s live demo also. It may ask you to pay for use if you use it more than 30 times.

For more information on municipality: