Recall election

A recall election (also called a recall referendum or representative recall) is a procedure by which voters can remove an elected official from office through a direct vote before his or her term has ended. Recalls, which are initiated when sufficient voters sign a petition, have a history dating back to the ancient Athenian democracy and are a feature of several contemporary constitutions.

Canada

The Province of British Columbia enacted representative recall in 1995. In that province, voters in a provincial riding can petition to have a sitting representative removed from office, even a Premier presently leading a government. If enough registered voters sign the petition, the Speaker of the legislature announces before the House that the member has been recalled and a by-election follows as soon as possible, giving voters the opportunity to replace the politician in question. By January 2003, 22 recall efforts had been launched. No one has been recalled so far, but one representative, Paul Reitsma, resigned in 1998 when it looked as if the petition to recall him would have enough signatures to spur a recall election. Reitsma resigned during the secondary verification stage, and the recall count ended.

California gubernatorial recall election

The 2003 California gubernatorial recall election was a special election permitted under California state law. It resulted in voters replacing incumbent Democratic Governor Gray Davis with Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger. Davis was ineligible to run for a third term due to term limits after the recall election. The recall effort spanned the latter half of 2003. Other California governors, including Pat Brown, Ronald Reagan, Jerry Brown, and Pete Wilson, had faced unsuccessful recall attempts.

After several legal and procedural efforts failed to stop it, California's first-ever gubernatorial recall election was held on October 7, and the results were certified on November 14, 2003, making Davis the first governor recalled in the history of California, and just the second in U.S. history. (The first was North Dakota's 1921 recall of Lynn Frazier. In 1988, a recall election had been scheduled for Arizona governor Evan Mecham, but he was impeached, convicted, and removed from office before his qualified recall election could occur.) California is one of 19 states that allow recalls. The third U.S. gubernatorial recall election occurred in Wisconsin in 2012.