Recall

Recall (politics)

Introduction to Recall

Recall (politics), method of removing elected officials from office before the end of their terms. In the United States approximately 1,000 cities and 11 states utilize this method to remove officials who have proved unsatisfactory to their constituencies. Recall was given its first practical application in the United States when a provision for recalling elective officials was incorporated into the Los Angeles charter of 1903. In succeeding years recall provisions appeared in numerous municipal charters throughout the nation. During the same period the recall was incorporated into several state constitutions, such as California in 1911, and extended to legislative and administrative officers and, in some cases, to judicial officers as well.

The machinery of the recall differs in detail from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. In order that a recall election may be instituted, a petition, signed by a specified proportion of the qualified voters, must be filed with the appropriate officials who then, after verifying the signatures, order an election.

In 2003 a political firestorm erupted over a recall vote in California. Democratic governor Gray Davis, who had been elected to a new four-year term in 2002, faced a recall only 11 months later when a Republican effort to oust him successfully reached the ballot. Davis lost the recall vote, becoming the first California governor to be recalled. The only other governor successfully recalled in United States history was North Dakota governor Lynn J. Frazier in 1921. ” (1)

Resources

Notes and References

• Information about Recall in the Encarta Online Encyclopedia

Guide to Recall

Recall in Legal Information Retrieval

The following is a basic concept of Recall in relation to information retrieval. In addition to this, Recall may be applied to legal texts, including case law, legislation and scholarly works. Recall refers to the extent to which an Information Retrieval retrieval system, including the indexing provided, is able to retrieve everything useful within its reach in response to a search. Its formal definition is the ratio of the number of relevant documents retrieved over all the relevant documents in an Information Retrieval database or collection: recall = number of relevant documents retrieved / number of relevant documents in database or collection. The Denominator of this Formula, the Total Number of Relevant Documents in an Information Retrieval Database or Collection, is Impossible to Determine.