Facing calls for her early ouster, Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price labeled her opponents “election deniers.” Price is not the only one attacking recalls as antithetical to electoral democracy. In Michigan, the head of the nonpartisan Voters Not Politicians group called a set of recalls against State House members “anti-democratic.” They have it backwards: the recall is raw democracy.

Claiming that recalls are an illegitimate attack on democracy is a popular defensive tactic for officials targeted by a recall. But the recall’s creators would see that argument as perverse: rather than undermining democracy, the recall was designed to be its savior. The Progressive Era champions of the recall intended the recall to arm the people with a weapon to protect their own interests. It was the recall’s opponents who claimed that allowing a recall to remove the presumably more knowledgeable elites from power would be “tyranny—the end of all things.”

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