My opponent, Dr. Frankenstein, will steal your kidney

This article gives some details:

"There was a law at that time [c.1990] that has since been changed that said if a coroner had no next of kin on a body or could not find the next of kin he could order organ donations and a team would come and bring up the organs and that law was on the books for a long time," Minyard said.…Three years ago McKenna made headlines when he sparred publicly with former Jefferson Parish Sheriff Harry Lee. At the time McKenna's magazine, The New Orleans Tribune, compared Lee to a Ku Klux Klansman.

Someone please explain to me why a coroner is an elected office?

I'm looking forward to the retort: "It is true that my opponent, Dr. Moreau McKenna, never sells any human body parts - that is because he uses them up for his perverse and unnatural experiments to create a new race of freakish animal/human hybrids!!!"

On a different note, I really don't think coroner should be an elective office to begin with.

From a UK perspective I goggle at the amount of elected offices in the UK - not only can I not see the reason for coroners to be elected, but having police and legal officials elected seems to lock in perverse conflicts of interest.

Ah, I should be goggling at the amount of elected offices in the US, not the UK in my last comment

There's a difference in the US between the title Coroner and the title Medical Examiner. It's determined by the state which system is used; most states use the Medical Examiner, who is an appointed position and has to be a doctor. The coroner is an elected official and doesn't have to be anything, really. It is a relic from the days when the coroner was seen as the "people's representative"
to ensure that doctors were not using cadavers for medical purposes. To have a doctor in that position was the considered to be a conflict of interest.