Organize / Removal from office

Impeachment, recall, and the routes most people assume exist

The lawful routes by which a public servant leaves office before their term ends — impeachment, recall, and the several others most people have never heard of.

Every route is a specific procedure in a specific text, with a specific body that acts and specific criteria for who may participate. There is no general-purpose removal lever, and the differences between the routes are the whole subject.

Who may use it. Depends on the route. Impeachment is a representative action: only legislators act, and a citizen's lever is contacting their own. Recall is a signature threshold: only registered voters of the officer's own jurisdiction may sign, and the signature of somebody outside it is void — that is the residency criterion the founder asked about, and it is the load-bearing rule of the whole mechanism.

Offices, not people

The founder asked for all public servants to be listed under impeachment. This registry lists every OFFICE and the removal route that reaches it, rather than a roster of named living people with a removal button beside each name. Two reasons, and the second is the one that matters. First, the office is the durable fact: officeholders change, and a name list is wrong within a year while the procedure is right for decades. Second, and load-bearing: a list of named people under a heading like 'impeachment' asserts something about each of them by placement alone, before a word is written. That is defamation by layout, it is the same failure the Watch caught and renamed itself over, and this project does not get to do it because the cause is civic. A named person enters this surface only inside a published campaign that carries a sourced record and a stated demand — which is what the campaigns section is for.

Find the office. The route tells you what mechanism reaches it, who may act, and — most often — that no citizen-initiated route exists at all, which is itself the most useful fact on the page.

President or Vice President of the United States

Route. Impeachment by the House, trial and conviction by the Senate

Who acts. Members of Congress only

Your lever. Contacting your own representative and senators. A benchmark pressure signal, never a procedure.

Threshold. A simple majority of the House to impeach (218 of 435 when all seats are filled); two thirds of senators present to convict (67 of 100).

Authority: U.S. Const. art. I, §2, cl. 5; art. I, §3, cl. 6; art. II, §4 · Who counts: resident of the district

There is no recall of any federal officer. None exists in the Constitution and no state may create one.

Federal judges, cabinet officers and other civil officers of the United States

Route. Impeachment by the House, trial and conviction by the Senate — the same route as the President, and the one it has actually been used for most often

Who acts. Members of Congress only

Your lever. Contacting your own representative and senators.

Threshold. House majority to impeach; two thirds of senators present to convict.

Authority: U.S. Const. art. II, §4 · Who counts: resident of the district

No recall exists. Federal judges hold office during good behaviour and impeachment is the only removal.

United States Senator or Representative

Route. Expulsion by that member's own chamber — NOT impeachment, which the Senate has held does not reach members of Congress

Who acts. The member's own chamber

Your lever. Contacting your own representative and senators; the ethics committees accept complaints.

Threshold. Two thirds of the chamber.

Authority: U.S. Const. art. I, §5, cl. 2 · Who counts: resident of the district

No recall of a member of Congress exists anywhere. States that have written one cannot enforce it — U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton, 514 U.S. 779 (1995), forecloses states adding qualifications to federal office. This is the single most common misunderstanding on this whole page.

Governor of Illinois and other Illinois executive officers

Route. Recall by petition, then a recall election — and separately, impeachment by the Illinois House with trial by the Illinois Senate

Who acts. Registered Illinois voters may circulate and sign; the Illinois General Assembly acts on impeachment.

Your lever. Signing and circulating a recall petition — wet ink, on paper, as a registered Illinois voter.

Threshold. Signatures equal to 15% of the votes cast for Governor in the preceding election, including at least 100 signatures from each of at least 25 separate counties — and the petition requires named legislative sponsors from both parties before circulation begins.

Authority: Ill. Const. art. III, §7; art. IV, §14 (impeachment) · Who counts: registered voter of the jurisdiction

The sponsor sub-clause is marked NEEDS_COUNSEL_VERIFICATION in the mechanism registry. Nothing here should be relied on for a live petition without a lawyer reading the current statute.

California statewide officers

Route. Recall by petition, then a recall election

Who acts. Registered California voters

Your lever. Signing and circulating a recall petition as a registered California voter.

Threshold. Signatures equal to 12% of the votes cast for that office at the last election, with a distribution requirement across counties.

Authority: Cal. Const. art. II, §14 · Who counts: registered voter of the jurisdiction

Mayor and aldermen of Chicago

Route. No municipal recall exists

Who acts. Nobody, by petition. Removal runs through criminal conviction, resignation, or the next election.

Your lever. The nomination petition for the next election, and the ballot. Chicago's ballot-access threshold is itself a real and demanding number.

Threshold. Not applicable — no recall procedure exists to have a threshold.

Authority: Illinois Municipal Code; Chicago Municipal Code — no recall provision. Illinois' recall provision reaches the Governor only. · Who counts: registered voter of the jurisdiction

Correct and load-bearing: the largest city in this project's own state has no citizen removal route at all between elections. A page that implied otherwise would be sending people to collect signatures for a procedure that does not exist.

Officers of other states, counties and municipalities

Route. Varies enormously — roughly nineteen states permit recall of state officials and many more permit it locally, each with its own threshold, grounds requirement and deadline

Who acts. Registered voters of that jurisdiction, where the route exists at all

Your lever. Your own state's election code and your county clerk are the authorities. Some states require stated legal grounds (malfeasance, conviction); others permit recall for any reason at all, and which kind yours is changes the entire campaign.

Threshold. Set by that state's constitution or code — commonly a percentage of the last vote for the office, within a fixed circulation window.

Authority: State constitutions and election codes; the National Conference of State Legislatures maintains the comparative table. · Who counts: registered voter of the jurisdiction

This project has verified Illinois, California and Chicago against primary sources. The other forty-seven states are named here as a category with a route to the authoritative table, and are NOT individually verified. Saying so is the difference between a registry and a rumour.

Who legally counts

• registered voter of the jurisdiction

  Only a person registered to vote within the officer's or measure's own jurisdiction may sign, and the signature must match the registration. Signatures from outside the jurisdiction are struck during verification, and campaigns routinely lose on exactly this.

  Check yours: Your county clerk or state board of elections publishes voter-registration lookup. Check before circulating, not after.

  Authority: State election codes; in Illinois, 10 ILCS 5 (Election Code) governs petition form, circulation and objection.

• resident of the district

  A congressional office counts contacts from its own district and discards the rest — most now filter by ZIP automatically. Contacting an official who does not represent you is speech, and it is not pressure, because it does not enter the count that matters to them.

  Check yours: Your own district is on the My Government page, from your address.

  Authority: Congressional office practice, documented by the Congressional Management Foundation.

• no criterion

  No residency, registration or membership criterion exists. Anyone may decline to buy something, stand somewhere lawful, comment on a proposed federal rule, or sign a petition that carries no statutory threshold.

  Check yours: Nothing to check.

  Authority: U.S. Const. amend. I; 5 U.S.C. §553 for federal rulemaking comment.

• injury in fact

  A court requires a concrete, particularized injury that a decision can redress. Caring intensely about a wrong is not standing, and this is the doorway most civic lawsuits never get through.

  Check yours: You cannot, from a page. This is the question a lawyer answers with your facts in front of them.

  Authority: Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555 (1992)