Recall elections

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 that official's term has ended. Recalls, which are initiated when sufficient voters sign a petition, have a history dating back to ancient Athenian democracy and feature in several contemporary constitutions. In indirect or representative democracy people's representatives are elected and these representatives rule for a specific period of time. But if any representative comes to be perceived as not properly discharging their responsibilities, then they can be called back with the written request of specific number or proportion of voters.

The Legislative Assembly of British Columbia enacted representative recall in 1995. In that province, voters in a provincial riding can petition to have their representative in parliament removed from office, even if that MLA is also the premier. (Holding a seat in the legislature is not constitutionally necessary to be premier, however.) If enough registered voters sign the petition, the speaker of the legislature announces in parliament that the member has been recalled and the lieutenant governor drops the writ for a by-election 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.

While recalls are not provided for at the federal level in Switzerland, six cantons allow them:

The possibility of recall referendums (together with the popular election of executives, the initiative and the legislative referendum) was introduced into several cantonal constitutions after the 1860s in the course of a broad movement for democratic reform. The instrument has never been of any practical importance – the few attempts at recall so far have failed, usually because the required number of signatures was not collected – and it was abolished in the course of constitutional revisions in Aargau (1980), Baselland (1984) and Lucerne (2007). The only successful recall so far happened in the Canton of Aargau in the year 1862. But the possibility of recalling municipal executives was newly introduced in Ticino in 2011, with 59% of voters in favor, as a reaction to the perceived problem of squabbling and dysfunctional municipal governments.

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