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By Brian Hews
Publisher | Follow X
August 31, 2026
Months of campaigning, political attacks and claims of widespread voter anger ended Monday with some unforgiving arithmetic: organizers seeking to recall Cerritos Councilmembers Lynda P. Johnson and Frank Aurelio Yokoyama didn’t collect enough signatures even to have them checked.
Cerritos City Clerk and Elections Official Cynthia Nava determined that both recall petitions were insufficient after conducting the initial count required before signature verification. Recall proponents needed 7,279 signatures for each councilmember, but submitted only 5,963 against Johnson and 5,819 against Yokoyama.
That left the Johnson recall 1,316 signatures short and the Yokoyama recall 1,460 short of the required number. Those aren’t signatures the City Clerk rejected as invalid; they’re signatures the campaign never collected in the first place.
The petitions were delivered to City Hall at 4:47 p.m. on Aug. 27. Nava conducted a prima facie review and determined that neither contained the minimum number of signatures required to proceed. Both petitions were declared insufficient, and the City Clerk will take no further action.
For a campaign that spent months portraying the recalls as a groundswell of Cerritos voter outrage, the final numbers offered an inconvenient measurement of that groundswell: the Johnson petition reached about 82 percent of the minimum requirement. In comparison, Yokoyama’s reached about 80 percent.
Normally, petition organizers worry about what happens after signatures are submitted. Election officials examine whether signers are registered voters, whether they live within the jurisdiction and whether their signatures otherwise qualify.
Cerritos election officials won’t have to do any of that.
The recall campaign failed before verification began because the raw number of signatures submitted didn’t reach the statutory minimum. Even if organizers had submitted exactly 7,279 signatures, qualification still would not have been assured because some signatures inevitably could have been rejected during verification.
A successful petition drive therefore ordinarily needs a cushion above the minimum. These campaigns needed a cushion to reach the minimum.
The individual filings show the Johnson campaign submitted an estimated 1,315 petition sections containing 5,963 signatures, while the Yokoyama campaign submitted an estimated 1,278 sections containing 5,819 signatures. Carla Gilhuys is identified as the person who delivered both sets of petitions.
More than 2,500 estimated petition sections were submitted between the two recall efforts, yet neither produced enough signatures to advance through the verification process.
The recall effort grew out of opposition to Cerritos’ water and sewer rate increases, eventually turning a policy dispute into an attempt to remove Johnson and Yokoyama from office before voters would ordinarily have another opportunity to judge them at the ballot box.
Recall proponents spent months attacking the councilmembers and arguing that residents wanted them removed. There were committees, campaign spending, petitions, social media posts and plenty of accusations directed at City Hall.
What there weren’t were 7,279 signatures.
The distinction is significant because neither recall was defeated by some obscure election rule or a massive purge of questionable signatures. There was no dramatic dispute over voter registration records, handwriting, or petition technicalities because the process never got that far.
The City Clerk essentially had to count high enough to answer one question: Did either campaign submit at least 7,279 signatures?
No.
Nava’s determination ends both recall efforts under the petitions submitted Aug. 27. Because neither met the minimum signature requirement, there will be no verification and no recall election resulting from the filings.
The city will retain the insufficient petitions, which are not public records. Recall proponents may examine their respective petitions within 21 days following the determination of insufficiency.
That allows organizers to look through the petitions and determine what went wrong, but one explanation won’t be available to them: blaming election officials for throwing out too many signatures.
Cerritos never had to throw out a single one.
After months of claims that voters were ready to remove Johnson and Yokoyama, the recall campaign finally produced a hard number measuring that support.
It came up more than 1,300 signatures short — twice.
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