THE NEW YORK TIMES NATIONALMONDAY, AUGUST 3, 2020 N AFERGUSON, Mo. — As an ac-
tivist who jumped into the political
arena after the police shooting of
Michael Brown here six years
ago, Cori Bush is accustomed to
hard fights. She has been maced,
shot at with rubber bullets and
cloaked in tear gas at so many pro-
tests against police brutality that
they have blurred together.
So when she heard that Repre-
sentative William Lacy Clay, the
10-term Democrat she is challeng-
ing in Missouri’s Democratic pri-
mary on Tuesday, had called her
“a prop” for the Justice Demo-
crats, a national progressive
group that exists to knock off ti-
tans of the party establishment
such as himself, Ms. Bush did not
miss a beat.
“I had no title, no name, came
out of the Ferguson uprising and
people know who I am across the
world,” Ms. Bush said on Satur-
day, responding to comments Mr.
Clay made about her in an inter-
view with The New York Times.
“Not because I took money from
some group — none of that. It is
because I stayed true to a mes-
sage of change for real people.”
Of Mr. Clay, she added, “He
doesn’t understand that, because
he doesn’t understand fighting for
people.”
All over the country this sum-
mer, progressive candidates like
Ms. Bush, 44, are doing battle with
veteran incumbents over the iden-
tity of the Democratic Party. In
New York City, Jamaal Bowman
defeated Representative Eliot L.
Engel, a 16-term incumbent and
powerful committee chairman. In
western Massachusetts, Alex
Morse, the mayor of Holyoke, is
trying to unseat another long-
serving chairman, Representa-
tive Richard E. Neal.
Emboldened by a lethal pan-
demic that has shone a spotlight
on systemic racial and economic
inequality, and the swell of public
support for the Black Lives Mat-
ter movement, they are seeking to
sustain the momentum gathered
in 2018 by insurgents, like Repre-
sentative Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez of New York, who felled es-
tablishment figures. In St. Louis,
Ms. Bush’s candidacy is a test of
whether the protest movement
can translate into hard electoral
power on the federal level.
For Democratic leaders watch-
ing warily from Washington, Mr.
Clay’s fate will also indicate
whether the rise in progressive
energy that has cost powerful
white incumbents in places like
the Bronx, Queens and Boston
their seats can also dislodge a
Black representative deep in the
heartland of the country.
In few places have the intra-
party battle lines glowed as
brightly as greater St. Louis, a
once-mighty industrial city
plagued by economic malaise, a
legacy of racial segregation and
now spiking coronavirus cases,
where the death of Mr. Brown in
2014 helped give rise to the move-
ment on the left demanding a re-
placement for an incremental ap-
proach to governing.
The contest has grown exceed-
ingly bitter, and Mr. Clay, 64, has
come to view it not only as a fight
for his own survival, but a chance
to snuff out an upstart movement
he sees as dangerously divisive.
In an interview last week, the con-
gressman suggested that the ef-
fort to unseat him by Ms. Bush,
who is also Black, rests on a racist
premise.
“The easy, racist way to lay it
out is, ‘Look at Clay — what has he
done for his district?’ ” he said,
adding, “I fight for that district ev-
ery single day.”
Mr. Clay accused the groups
like Justice Democrats and Brand
New Congress that have helped
groom progressive primary chal-
lengers of targeting members of
the Congressional Black Caucus
specifically because “they think
we are easy targets.”
“She’s a prop,” Mr. Clay said of
Ms. Bush. “They use her to raise
money to support their infrastruc-
ture.”
Mr. Clay has a powerful infra-
structure of his own.
A Clay has represented part of
St. Louis in Congress since 1969.
William Lacy Clay Sr. was an icon
of the civil rights movement in the
city and a founding member of the
Congressional Black Caucus.
When he retired nearly two dec-
ades ago, his son, William Lacy
Clay Jr., inherited the seat and the
loyalty of Black St. Louisans who
have sent him back to Washington
every two years since.
By some estimates, a majority
of voters in the city have never
voted for a congressman by any
other name. Because Democrats
so dominate this district, the real
contest is fought each term in the
Democratic primary, not the gen-
eral election.
Mr. Clay is not bashful about his
seniority in the Black Caucus and
among the intensely hierarchical
House Democratic Caucus, argu-
ing that his easy access to the
levers of power helps his district.
He has the backing of Speaker
Nancy Pelosi and many of the par-
ty’s establishment pillars, like the
Planned Parenthood Action Fund.
“There is no substitute in life for
substance,” he said. “Substance is
so relevant to people. That’s why
there’s been a Clay there for the
last 52 years.”
After falling about 20 points
short against Mr. Clay in 2018, Ms.
Bush has come back with a better-
funded and more aggressive cam-
paign. A documentary that chroni-
cled her 2018 campaign, as well as
those of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and
other progressives, “Knock Down
the House,” helped burnish her
profile. Perhaps more important,
her aides argue that in the currentmoment of national upheaval,
more voters are beginning to un-
derstand the need for policy pre-
scriptions she has long champi-
oned, like Medicare for all, a $15-
an-hour minimum wage, a univer-
sal basic income and the whole-
sale dismantling of police
departments.
At campaign events, Ms. Bush
speaks vividly about her own bat-
tle with the coronavirus this
spring — how her fingertips
turned blue as she was deprived of
oxygen, and her fear of the medi-
cal bills that would follow her two
hospital stays — to bolster her ar-
guments.
But her case against Mr. Clay
centers on the protests that have
rippled through St. Louis after the
deaths of George Floyd and Bre-
onna Taylor at the hands of the po-
lice in Minneapolis and Louisville.
Ms. Bush’s brand of politics is built
on being on the streets with every-
day people. By her account, Mr.
Clay has simply not showed up
and proposed only half-measures
to fix things.“When we were getting our
butts kicked and I was maced in
the face in Florissant a few weeks
ago and people were getting beat
on by police officers — no, no,” she
said. “Did he show up the next day
to say, ‘You can’t do this in my dis-
trict, you can’t treat people this
way?’ No, no.”
That message has won Ms.
Bush the avid backing of a loosely
affiliated coalition of activists,
young people of color and white
progressives enraged by the
events of the last several months.
Jasnaam Singh, 23, who was
among almost a dozen volunteers
who showed up at a school park-
ing lot in Ferguson to canvass for
Ms. Bush on an unseasonably cool
Saturday morning, said he first
encountered her through a net-
work of supporters for Senator
Bernie Sanders of Vermont and
then noticed her showing up on
the streets again and again this
summer, after the death of Mr.
Floyd.
“Right then and there, I knew
that she was a voice that themovement desperately needed to
be heard in D.C.,” he said.
For those who have tended the
protest movement since Ferguson
— watching as Black activists and
reformers have slowly gained
footholds in City Hall here, the St.
Louis County prosecutor’s office
and in Jefferson City, the state
capital — a victory by Ms. Bush
would mark a milestone of an-
other magnitude.
“She would fit right in as some-
body who is pushing for the sys-
tematic change that we need, and
not the small tedious change that
we see,” said Rasheen Aldridge,
an activist who won a seat in the
Missouri Legislature last year.
The challenge for Ms. Bush has
been persuading more moderate
voters — Black and otherwise —
to take a chance on a relative polit-
ical novice who is unapologetical-
ly pushing for far-left policies like
defunding the police.
Mr. Clay may not be wildly pop-
ular in the district, political ana-
lysts said, but he is not unpopular
either and is considered a safe
choice among the older Black vot-
ers who make up the voting base.
And unlike Representative Jo-
seph Crowley, who lost to Ms. Oca-
sio-Cortez in 2018, or Mr. Engel,
Mr. Clay is a Black man in a plural-
ity Black district.
Antonio French, a former al-
derman and mayoral candidate
from St. Louis’s North Side, said
he had noticed a “disconnect” be-
tween the progressive politics of
many white voters and young ac-
tivists of color rallying behind Ms.
Bush and those of Black voters inhis neighborhood.
“Defund and get rid of the police
is not a message I hear from aver-
age voters in my ward or districts
like mine,” Mr. French said. “It’s
quite the opposite. If you go to a
Black neighborhood ward meet-
ing, primarily you are hearing
people complain about the lack of
police in that neighborhood.”
Mr. Clay points out that after
Ferguson, he encouraged the Jus-
tice Department to investigate the
city’s Police Department and
force changes. He wrote key pro-
visions of the sweeping police
overhaul bill House Democrats
passed this summer and heads an
influential subcommittee with ju-
risdiction over eviction law.
And even as he lacerates Ms.
Bush, Mr. Clay has made direct
overtures to her allies. He signed
onto the Green New Deal, the lib-
eral climate and economic agenda
that has been among their most
prominent demands. It appears to
have worked. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez,
who campaigned for Ms. Bush in
2018, has sat on the sidelines this
time around.
Ms. Bush rejected Mr. Clay’s ef-
forts to portray her campaign as
racially divisive and accused him
of using dirty tactics with “racist
undertones” when he sent a mai-
ler including an image of Ms. Bush
altered to make her skin appear
darker.
“No one is targeting C.B.C.
members,” Ms. Bush said. “What
they are targeting is people who
are not doing the work of the com-
munities — and communities are
suffering.”Cori Bush, above, a progressive activist, is challenging William
Lacy Clay, left, a 10-term Democratic congressman whose father,
William Lacy Clay Sr., served before him. A Clay has repre-
sented part of St. Louis in Congress since 1969.PHOTOGRAPHS BY MICHAEL B. THOMAS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESProgressive in St. Louis
Aims to Topple a Dynasty
By NICHOLAS FANDOSlawsuit over the primary.
Mr. Patel trails the incumbent,
Representative Carolyn B. Ma-
loney, by some 3,700 votes, though
more than 12,000 ballots have
been disqualified, including about
1,200 that were missing post-
marks, he said.
He is among the plaintiffs in a
lawsuit filed in July that is asking
a federal court to order election of-
ficials to count disqualified bal-
lots. The lawsuit included testi-
mony that election officials had
mailed out more than 34,000 bal-
lots one day before the June 23 pri-
mary.
A winner has also not been de-
clared in a congressional district
in the Bronx, where Ritchie Tor-
res, a Democratic city council-
man, holds a comfortable lead
over several other contenders.
Other states and localities had
vote-by-mail primaries during the
pandemic, with some scattered re-
ports of problems — though noth-
ing on the scale of New York City’s
weekslong process. Even before
the outbreak, the city’s Board of
Elections had a reputation as a
troubled agency that ran elections
rife with problems.
New York City election officials
insisted last week that they were
doing their best under the ex-
traordinary circumstances.
They pointed out the difficulties
in protecting election workers
from the coronavirus, and cited
state laws requiring the disqualifi-
cation of ballots for various small
errors — including missing signa-
tures on ballot envelopes or envel-
opes sealed with tape — for con-
tributing to the high number of in-
validated ballots.
Election officials also said the
changing plans for the state’s
presidential primary — it was ini-
tially canceled before being re-
instated by the courts — had de-
layed the process of sending out
absentee ballots.
The city’s Board of Elections is
not expected to certify the vote
until Tuesday. Thirteen weeks lat-
er, on Nov. 3, the state and city
could face another crush of absen-
tee ballots.
Frederic M. Umane, the board’s
secretary, defended the handling
of the election, calling the ballot-
counting process “slow, but accu-
rate and open.”
He said the board’s operation
was greatly affected by the out-
break.
“Our staff was decimated by
Covid,” Mr. Umane said, noting
the board had about 350 perma-
nent workers and other tempo-
rary workers, many of whom were
sick and could not work before the
primary.
Mr. Umane said the board
might need hundreds more work-
ers for the November election.
Primaries were conducted
across the state, but New York
City seemed to encounter the big-
gest problems, in part because it
had many closely contested races
and substantial voter participa-
tion.
Mr. Cuomo, a third-term Demo-
crat, acknowledged last week that
the primary was flawed, likening
mail-in voting to other “systems
that we were working on but were
not ready,” such as remote learn-
ing and telemedicine, and sug-
gesting the problem lay at a local
level.
“We did have — not we —
boards of elections had opera-
tional issues, some better, some
worse, and they have to learn
from them,” Mr. Cuomo said. “And
we want to get the lessons and
make the system better and make
it better for November.”
A person familiar with the inter-
nal operation of the city’s Board of
Elections, but not authorized to
speak on the record, said that hav-
ing to increase the number of
mail-in ballots had caused enor-mous struggles at the agency.
“Imagine saying, ‘I’m having a
dinner party for 10 people,’ and
then they say, ‘No, it’s 100 peo-
ple,’ ” the person said. “It’s a very
deep learning curve.”
The person added that the
board made missteps along the
way, including not hiring enough
people to count the absentee bal-
lots. Even the vendors hired to
produce the ballots seemed over-
whelmed.
In comments on Saturday, Mr.
Cuomo said his administration
had offered help to local election
boards, including “personnel to do
counting,” though no boards
seemed to take the state up on its
offer. He also noted that some
boards did not start counting bal-
lots until the second week of July.
“Well, what was that?” he said.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly re-
ferred to the New York primary
over the last two weeks, warning
that the “same thing would hap-
pen, but on massive scale” across
the country on Nov. 3.
The president returned to the
topic on Thursday as means of jus-
tifying his suggestion that the
general election might need to be
postponed, a trial balloon that waswidely panned by even his fellow
Republicans.
New York State lawmakers said
they had responded to the prob-
lems last month by approving a
roster of fixes to the vote-by-mail
system, though it was not clear if
Mr. Cuomo would sign the bills.
Among other changes, the legisla-
tion would allow the counting of
ballots received shortly after the
election without postmarks and
would require officials to notify
voters of small errors in their bal-
lot envelopes.
Election experts pointed to an
array of causes for the issues in
primary: In late April, as the toll
from coronavirus mounted, Mr.
Cuomo ordered a wide expansion
of absentee voting, sending every
New Yorker eligible to vote in the
primary an application for an ab-
sentee ballot.
While the intention may have
been to encourage voting, the in-
frastructure lagged: Until a wave
of changes approved in 2019, New
York had been behind other states
in adopting measures like early
voting.
“The state has long had some of
the strictest rules when it comes
to being able to cast an absenteeballot, and it wasn’t built to sup-
port the increased volume,” said
Lawrence Norden, director of the
Election Reform Program at the
Brennan Center for Justice.
The counting of absentee bal-
lots is more labor intensive than
machine counts of in-person
votes, which in the past had made
up more than 90 percent of New
York’s election returns. Jerry H.
Goldfeder, a veteran election law-
yer, said the board did not have
enough money to hire workers to
process absentee ballots.
“They could have asked for
money and hired more staff, be-
cause they knew in advance they
were going to get an avalanche of
absentee ballots,” Mr. Goldfeder
said. “There’s nothing magical
about that.”
In all, the New York City Board
of Elections sent more than
750,000 ballots with prepaid re-
turn envelopes, and some 400,
were mailed back. Postage on pre-
paid envelopes costs less than a
stamp and is charged to the payer
only if used.
Prepaid envelopes are not typi-
cally postmarked by the post of-
fice’s sorting systems, though the
Postal Service recommends thatballot envelopes use a special bar
code to help identify them. Offi-
cials say they make every effort to
identify ballots and assure a post-
mark, a critical element in deter-
mining if ballots were sent by the
Election Day deadline.
That means using human “gate-
keepers” to backstop the Postal
Service’s computerized sorting
systems, who pull ballot envel-
opes out, one at a time, and feed
them through a cancellation ma-
chine to assure a postmark.
But it was far from foolproof:
Michael Calabrese, a manager at
the Postal Service’s Manhattan
processing plant, could only con-
firm that extra gatekeepers were
on hand to locate stray ballots on
Election Day itself.
Even so, some unmarked bal-
lots got through.
“It’s not a 100 percent process,”
he said, under questioning from
Judge Analisa Torres of Federal
District Court in Manhattan. “It’s
not something we could normally
do, but in order to capture and
read those ballots, we did that.”
The postal agency defended its
performance, but also acknowl-
edged that “some ballots may not
have been postmarked.” It said it
would take “action to resolve the
issue going forward.”
“We continue to work with the
secretary of state and all New
York boards of election and look
forward to a successful general
election,” Xavier C. Hernandez, a
Postal Service spokesman, said.
Bruce Gyory, a Democratic po-
litical consultant, said the state
and city needed to drastically in-
crease election staff for Novem-
ber. “This is logistics,” Mr. Gyory
said. “It isn’t rocket science.”
He added that such steps could
make it more difficult for Mr.
Trump to cite problems in New
York to dispute the results of the
general election.
“He is trying to create doubt,”
Mr. Gyory said. “Because he
knows he’s going to lose the elec-
tion if things don’t change.”Mail-In Ballot Tally Delay
Raises Alarm in New York
From Page AJeffery C. Mays, Luis Ferré-
Sadurní and Emma G. Fitzsim-
mons contributed reporting.
The New York City Board of
Elections has yet to certify the
June 23 vote after getting more
than 10 times as many absen-
tee ballots as recent elections.VICTOR J. BLUE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES