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Innovation in city hall has accelerated with the rise of information communication technologies (ICTs) since the 1990s. The adoption of these technologies in local government has contributed to the emergence of electronic-government or e-government. While a growing body of research is assessing e-government across large metropolitan areas, a systematic analysis as to why and how e-government policies have been adopted in local government remains rare. Cross-national comparative studies are even rarer. Relying on a Evaluation Index of Local E-Government Sophistication as well as quantitative and qualitative approaches, the purpose of the analysis is threefold: 1) based on multiple regression, explain local e-government sophistication among a randomly selected sample of incorporated municipalities in the state of Washington in the U.S. and communes in the Aquitaine region in France; 2) based on descriptive statistics, illustrate the high level of e-government sophistication in the cities of Seattle and Bordeaux; and 3) guided by a model of policy innovation and based on a series of semi-structured interviews with city officials in Seattle and Bordeaux, explain the adoption of e-government policies in these cases that are embedded in very different national contexts. The results of this study help us understand macro trends in local e-government sophistication and some of the processes that guide the adoption of the relevant innovative ICT policies at the local level.