Which States Can Recall Their Officials?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.