In the fall of 2020, Elaine Talbott entered the post office in Madison, Miss., holding an absentee elector’s ballot. Talbott had heard nightmarish stories about the challenges of voting by mail in her home state, and she was eager to put those anecdotes to the test.
“I wanted to see through the lens of somebody whose only option was to vote by mail,” said Talbott, a Madison County resident and member of the League of Women Voters, a national organization advocating for voting rights. “There’s nothing like personal experience to educate yourself.”
To vote by mail in Mississippi, eligible residents must fill out their ballot in the presence of a notary, including the postmaster at a local post office. Notaries must then certify the ballot before it can be sent to the appropriate circuit clerk’s office for counting.
Upon requesting the notary services of the postmaster in Madison, however, Talbott hit a dead end. The postmaster declined to certify her ballot, explaining that he had received orders from his superiors to stop notarizing mail-in votes. Those instructions were detailed in a letter from Postmaster General Louis DeJoy displayed behind a plexiglass barrier.
To Talbott, the incident at the post office is an example of the demoralizing, often unexpected obstacles Mississippi residents face when attempting to exercise their right to vote.
“It just should not be this hard,” she said. “It’s disenfranchisement, any way you look at it.”
Talbott has spent the past 15 years chipping away at the barriers that continue to keep Mississippians from the polls. Working with the LWV’s Jackson area chapter and other local partners, she has helped register and educate voters across the state and fought to amend restrictive voting laws the Legislature has passed.
These regulatory changes represent small victories for Talbott, who sees the effects of voter suppression in many Jackson neighborhoods and communities.
“When you can put a face to what policy does to people’s everyday lives, it’s not about partisan politics—it’s about the common welfare,” she said. “And I’m very upset about the fact that that doesn’t seem to be a major concern in our political life anymore.”
Grassroots Solutions
Talbott was determined to vote by mail in 2020 despite the setback at the Madison post office. She also worried that limited notary availability in the greater Jackson area—a shortage exacerbated by the postmaster general’s orders and the raging COVID-19 pandemic—would prevent other residents from casting absentee ballots.
To address this challenge, the League of Women Voters set up “drive-thru” notary stands in Jackson, inviting residents to fill out blank ballots from their cars and have LWV members notarize them. Working Together Jackson, a coalition of local groups and institutions focused on community organizing, co-sponsored the initiative.
“We had drive-thru notaries on two consecutive Saturdays at New Horizon Church and at the Jackson Medical Mall,” Talbott said. “Two of our members were already notaries, and two more went and paid the fee and became notaries.”
While Talbott wishes the event had attracted more prospective voters, those who did show up were excited to have a safe, easy option to vote by mail as COVID-19 continued to spread.
“Folks were absolutely grateful,” Chevon Chatman, a senior organizer at Working Together Jackson, said. “We had grandmamas, grandaddies and aunties pulling up ready to vote, and appreciative that they could do it in their own neighborhoods.”
The need for community-organized drive-thru notary stands amid a pandemic underscores why Mississippi’s voting laws must be reformed, Chatman said.
“Making voting cumbersome does not serve anybody,” she said. “Folks are living their lives every single day and working and taking care of kids. Meanwhile, they have to jump through all these hoops just to cast a vote? It’s frankly unnecessary, and it doesn’t promote citizen engagement.”
A Gradual Path to Advocacy
Talbott’s passion for voting rights did not develop overnight. Raised in a small, conservative town in Iowa, she took a sales job that allowed her to travel the country and eventually brought her to Mississippi in 1979. She credits her travels and settling in Mississippi—particularly the overt racism she encountered in the state’s Delta region—with steering her toward political activism.
“There wasn’t any one big epiphany,” she said. “It was little stuff that … slowly started to puncture this bubble that I lived in for so long.”
Talbott was drawn to the League of Women Voters because of its mission to protect civil liberties and address societal inequities through policy. In the organization’s Jackson chapter, she found a group of women whose politics and values closely aligned with her own.
“I thought it was a bunch of nice ladies,” she said, recalling her first time attending an LWV meeting in 2009. “(But) when I looked at their positions, I thought, ‘OK, I can get on board with 99.9% of this.’”
Since joining the LWV, Talbott has worked to ensure that Jackson area residents have the information they need to register to vote and make an informed decision each time they cast a ballot. Her organization has also joined various lawsuits challenging Mississippi voting restrictions, including a 2023 statute limiting residents’ right to receive assistance when delivering or returning their ballots.
Other LWV members praised Talbott’s leadership and resourcefulness, noting that her political and institutional knowledge have been indispensable to the Jackson area chapter.
“Elaine has been a member of the League of Women Voters (since) before I even thought about becoming a member,” Margaret Barnes, the chapter’s current president, said. “She has been such a wealth of information for all of us, letting us know where to find certain policies and who at the national office to contact when we need information.”
Looking ahead, Talbott says LWV will continue its “Fair Maps” campaign in Mississippi, advocating for the creation of voting districts that preserve the power of Black residents and keep communities intact. Though the effort has faced resistance from the state Legislature, Talbott insists that progress on voting rights is possible with the right combination of patience and determination.
“We like to see things happen suddenly and in big chunks, and a lot of times it’s incremental,” she said. “I’ve had to learn to take your wins where you can and just keep working.”
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