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Cerritos elected officials (l-r) Chuong Vo, Naresh Solanki and Bruce Barrows are moving the election to an off-year/odd year for no legal reason, and padding their wallets with an extra year on council.
April 27, 2023
By Brian Hews
The latest Cerritos voter registration numbers from the LA County Registrar Recorder’s office do not reflect the representation on the City Council and is strong evidence that Cerritos should be moved from at-large voting to district voting.
Political Data, Inc., a service used by probably 99% of politicians when gathering data on voters, is within a handful of votes compared to the Registrar/Recorder’s numbers.
According to the data, there are 35,471 registered voters in Cerritos, of that 15,269 (43%) are Democrat and 8,502 (24%) are Republican.
Notably, 10,031 (28%) of the overall registrants are independent/decline to state/no party preference, which is 4% higher than the registered Republican voters.
On their website, the non-partisan Public Policy Institute states, “in surveys over the past year, independent likely voters have been more likely to lean Democratic (52%) than Republican (37%); 11% did not lean toward either party.
Allocating those numbers would add 5,216 and 3,711 voters to the Democratic and Republican rolls, totaling 20,485 and 12,213, respectively.
For those of you keeping score, Democratic voters in Cerritos outnumber Republican voters by 8,272, 58% to 34%, yet the make-up of the city council is 4-1 in favor of the Republicans.
That is a direct result of past voter suppression tactics by the Republicans on the council.
A couple of years ago, SB 415 passed, which mandated cities align with statewide elections. A lawsuit won by the city of Redondo later mandated that charter cities, like Cerritos, did not have to comply with SB 415.
So what did the Republican majority do? In October 2021, they moved the March 2022 statewide election to an April 2022 stand-alone election; turnout was predictably low, only Democrat Frank Yokoyama voted no to move the elections.
Now the three Republicans on city council – Bruce Barrows (who was appointed, not elected), Naresh Solanki and Chuong Vo – want to move the election from April 2024 to April 2025, an off year/odd year when there is traditionally lower turnout.
Many are residents are protesting, which will fall on deaf ears at tonight’s Republican-led city council meeting; a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans 58% to 34%.
Time to move to District Voting Cerritos.
