Calcasieu Parish Clerk of Court Lynn Jones likes to joke that his office is the Rodney Dangerfield of parishwide elected officials.

“We don’t really get the respect until they need us,” he said with a chuckle. “It happens all the time; half the time, people don’t even know what we do. They’ll see me on the street corners during election time, but that’s just a very small thing.”

Jones, who will be celebrating his 19th year as clerk in July, oversees the clerical functions of the court — like keeping records, issuing service of process, and entering judgments and orders.

“Just like everybody else, we’ve had some challenging times,” Jones told members of the Kiwanis Club of Downtown Lake Charles this week. “In the early days of the pandemic we weren’t allowed to make contact, we were all working half-shifts and everything had to be touchless.”

Their saving grace? A baby monitor.

“When our office closes it, of course, affects the court system. It also affects a lot of other aspects of people’s lives — like real estate,” he said. “We had to come up with some very interesting ways to get through the process. We had to figure out a way to converse with each other without touching so I came up with a baby monitor duct taped to a pole. It took a lot of little things like that to get through that process.”

The office also took a licking during the double-punch of Hurricanes Laura and Delta in 2020.

“We got hit pretty hard and I’m very proud of my staff because we were up and running in less than five business days after Hurricane Laura,” he said. “We were the first governmental agency that was receiving customers — before the Police Jury, before the District Attorney, before the city. We had a command center that the sheriff let us borrow out on the lawn, wires running through the office. We didn’t have a generator so we had to make due keeping our servers up and running.”

After Hurricane Delta, his office was down just one day.

“We’ve just learned to go with the flow now,” he said.

After several thousand documents were damaged when the courthouse roof leaked, Jones said his office is going through the process of digitizing all of their records.

“We’re trying to go to a complete paperless digital age,” he said. “We just don’t have any more space. We have filled up a warehouse and the Police Jury has said, ‘No more.’”

One of the drawbacks of going completely digital, however, is ensuring the checks and balances are in place to prevent security breaches.

“We saw this just last week with the Office of Motor Vehicles,” he said. “We have to think about this every day now. Luckily, business has been pretty good the last several years and we have enough money now to invest in backup systems. I asked one of our IT workers how many backup systems we have now and she said eight. I was not comfortable going forward in a digitized  world otherwise. It’s a little bit scary, but I think we’ve done our due diligence.”

His office also handles passports and issues birth certificates.

“The area most people see our office is during the election process,” he said. “I’m a very big advocate of voter participation. For about 18 years, I’ve never missed an election ­— big or small — getting the word out by standing out on street corners (often in costume). People have come to expect me to be out there to remind them. I enjoy doing it even though it’s kind of silly — my wife doesn’t like it — but it proves there are people out there who still care about the process and how important it is.”

Jones, who served two terms on the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, said Louisiana is ranked sixth in the nation on how well it runs its elections. That’s attributed to the state’s accurate numbers, election integrity and existing laws.

He said though he loves the current voting machines the state uses, he realizes a change is necessary because the 20-year-old units don’t keep a paper trail once votes are cast.

“Some states want to go back to having all paper ballots and that is the wrong direction to go,” Jones said. “Even it if is to try and secure the integrity, that opens up so many loopholes. Not only that, but the cost involved to have separate ballots for separate precincts and to have so many people there to count them would be crazy.”

A more common-sense approach, he said, would be to find a machine that would digitally allow ballots to be cast while also keeping a receipt of the vote locked within the machine should future reference be needed.

“It would be a win-win for everyone,” he said. “Once that happens, we will be No. 1 in elections.”

Another item on his wish list is for more volunteer election commissioners.

“It takes about 700 across the parish each election to man the 123 precincts,” Jones said. “We always need more help.”