BATON ROUGE — East Baton Rouge Parish early voting and mail-in results were delayed Tuesday night after election officials said they had to restart the counting process because of a scanning issue, coupled with an unusually long ballot.

Voting officials began opening early, absentee and mail-in ballots well before polls closed at 8 p.m., Registrar of Voters Steve Raborn said.

Officials scanned the ballots in batches of 100, but around 8 p.m., one batch showed as fewer than 100. The next batch scanned fine, leading officials to restart the entire counting process.

Another 500 ballots had to be reviewed because the voter did not fill out the second page, Rayburn said, and 250 more were returned from overseas military members that election workers had to translate to proper ballots.

Additionally, Trey Williams with the Secretary of State's Office said this year's ballots were longer than in other years due to "The Great Convergence" - a decennial event when a lot of local races are up for election. More than 2,500 candidates were on ballots across the state, Williams said. 

"It is about accuracy over quickness," he said. 

The late surge of early voting results helped push Democrat Chauna Banks into a runoff against Republican Blake Miguez for Louisiana's 6th Congressional District U.S. House seat. Voters will return to the polls on Saturday, Dec. 12, for that election.