Douglas County’s longest-serving elected official has announced she won’t seek re-election to a seventh term.

County Clerk Patty Jaimes, who has worked in the Clerk’s Office since Lyndon Johnson was president, said Thursday that she would not stand for re-election in November 2004. Instead, she’ll finish her current four-year term and leave office in January 2005.

“My energy level isn’t as high as it used to be,” she said. “I just want to slow down to a brisk walk.”

Jaimes, a 62-year-old Republican who serves as the county’s chief election officer, said she wasn’t certain what she would do after ending a career that spanned the move from hand counting of ballots to computerized tallying of election results.

“I have some options and haven’t made any decisions what I’m going to do,” she said.

Jaimes wasn’t ruling out the possibility of seeking another political office.

Craig Weinaug, Douglas County administrator, said Jaimes had served with distinction as clerk. She joined the clerk’s staff in the accounts payable department in 1967 and became clerk in 1981.

“Patty has an incredible amount of integrity,” Weinaug said. “She’s spent basically her entire professional life serving citizens of Douglas County.”

Bob Johnson, chairman of the Douglas County Commission, said he hadn’t been aware Jaimes was thinking about stepping aside.

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“Personally, she’s been a great clerk and a great public servant,” he said.

Chris Miller, chair of the Douglas County Republican Party’s Central Committee, said most people had no idea which political party Jaimes represents. That’s a positive reflection of her nonpartisan approach to work in the Clerk’s Office, he said.

“I think Patty’s a great gal. I think she’s been incredible in that office,” Miller said.

Miller said he expected candidates for clerk to begin positioning themselves for next year’s campaign. He had heard of one possible candidate but declined to reveal the name.

Jaimes said the next clerk should expect workload in the office to increase and for voting reforms to take hold. She said she hoped the push to rely on more technology, including touch-screen balloting, wouldn’t scare people away from polling stations.

“Sometimes new technology like that has a tendency to keep some people from participating,” Jaimes said.

In an interview outside her office at the Douglas County Courthouse, she recalled the old days when votes were tallied by hand.

“I do remember being here all night on a presidential election year,” she said. “I was still in the office when some of the girls were coming in at 8 o’clock the next morning.”

During her career, Jaimes has been criticized about voting miscues in Douglas County. After April’s election, for example, the Douglas County Commission directed her to recount all ballots cast after problems with software and some ballots being counted twice.

In the April primary, so many voters turned out at some polling places that Jaimes had to use her office photocopier to produce extra ballots, all of which later had to be counted by hand.

In 2000, election officials counted another set of ballots twice, leading to a revision of totals.

Two years earlier, 3,000 votes were “lost” in the reporting translation from the Clerk’s Office to the Secretary of State’s Office in Topeka.

Jaimes said she didn’t dwell on those incidents.

“In any position,” she said, “there’s always room for improvement.”

Jaimes was born and raised in Coffey County and graduated from Waverly High School. She moved to Lawrence in 1959.