Which States Can Recall Their Officials?

Part 1 · Definition

What Recall Actually Is

Recall is a process that lets voters remove and replace an elected official before their term is up, without needing to wait for the next scheduled election. It's a political device, not a legal one — which is the key thing that separates it from impeachment. Impeachment requires a state legislature to bring specific charges and act as judge and jury; recall, in most states, requires no charges at all — just enough voters willing to sign a petition and then vote the official out.

19 states allow recall of state officials, plus the District of Columbia. All but one (Montana, which relies on statute alone) write the right to recall directly into their state constitution. Virginia has a related but distinct process — a "recall trial" where a circuit court, not the voters, decides whether to remove an official after a citizen petition — so it isn't counted among the 19 true recall states.

The mechanism began at the local level in Los Angeles in 1903. Michigan and Oregon were the first states to extend it to state officials, in 1908. Minnesota followed in 1996, New Jersey in 1993, and Illinois — the most recent state to adopt it, and the only one limited strictly to recalling the governor — in 2010.

Part 2 · The Requirements

Every State's Requirements

Signature requirements are usually a percentage of the votes cast (or registered voters) for that office in the last election — not a flat number — so the bar rises and falls with turnout. Circulation time is how long petitioners have to actually gather those signatures once they're cleared to start.

Part 3 · Grounds Requirements

The 8 States Requiring Specific Grounds

In most recall states, any registered voter can start a recall campaign for essentially any reason — Michigan's constitution puts it plainly: "the sufficiency of any statement of reasons or grounds... shall be a political rather than a judicial question." But eight states — seven of the 19, plus Virginia's separate recall-trial process — require the petition to allege one of a specific, named set of reasons before it can even begin circulating.

• Alaska — lack of fitness, incompetence, neglect of duties, or corruption.
• Georgia — malfeasance, misconduct, violation of oath of office, failure to perform legal duties, or misuse of public funds/property.
• Kansas — felony conviction, misconduct in office, or failure to perform legally prescribed duties.
• Minnesota — serious malfeasance or nonfeasance in office, or conviction of a serious crime while in office.
• Montana — physical or mental unfitness, incompetence, violation of oath of office, official misconduct, or certain felony convictions.
• Rhode Island — indictment for a felony, misdemeanor conviction, or a finding of probable ethics-code violation by the state ethics commission.
• Washington — malfeasance, misfeasance, or violation of the oath of office.
• Virginia (recall trial, not election) — neglect of duty, misuse of office, or incompetence with material adverse effect, or a drug-related/hate-crime misdemeanor conviction.

Part 4 · Governors

Governor Recalls: The Full History

Despite 19 states allowing it, a gubernatorial recall has only ever reached an actual election four times in U.S. history — and only two of those four actually removed the governor from office.

• 1921 — North Dakota, Gov. Lynn J. Frazier: successfully recalled. The first and most sweeping governor recall in U.S. history — voters removed not just Frazier, but the state attorney general and the commissioner of agriculture in the same election.
• 1988 — Arizona, Gov. Evan Mecham: recall qualified, but never reached a vote. Enough signatures were submitted to trigger a recall election, but the state House impeached Mecham first, removing him before the scheduled recall could occur.
• 2003 — California, Gov. Gray Davis: successfully recalled. The best-known case — Davis was voted out and replaced by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the same election.
• 2012 — Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker: survived. Triggered by backlash over collective-bargaining restrictions for public employees; Walker kept his seat.
• 2021 — California, Gov. Gavin Newsom: survived. The most recent gubernatorial recall election in U.S. history.

Part 5 · Legislators

State Legislator Recalls: The Full History

Legislative recalls are more common than gubernatorial ones, but still genuinely rare given how many state legislators have served across more than a century of these laws being on the books. Enough signatures to force an actual recall election have been gathered just 40 times in U.S. history — and of those 40, only 21 succeeded in unseating the legislator, a 53% success rate once a recall actually reaches the ballot.

That 2011 spike wasn't a coincidence — it was almost entirely Wisconsin, where a fight over collective-bargaining rights for public employees triggered nine state senate recall elections in a single year. Nearly half of every legislative recall election in U.S. history (43%) happened in just the three years from 2011 to 2013.

Part 6 · The Debate

The Case For and Against

Where This Fits

Recall and Amen28: The Same Underlying Idea

Recall and Amen28 are both answers to the same basic problem: an elected official who has stopped answering to the people they serve, with no meaningful mechanism to intervene before the next scheduled election or the end of a term. Recall solves it by letting voters act directly, state by state, official by official. Amen28 proposes a different structural answer at the federal level — an elected, independent Chief Justice of the USA, built to check the executive branch's control over the DOJ, ethics offices, and federal auditing on an ongoing basis, not just once every four years.

Neither mechanism is a cure-all on its own, as the historical record above shows plainly. But both rest on the same premise: accountability that only shows up on election day isn't really accountability at all.