The Lafayette Parish Clerk of Court has a solution for what happened with early voting ballot counting on election day Saturday.

Clerk of Court Louis Perret says a printer issue that was used to print the early vote ballots were having problems read by the optical scanners.. This lead to early vote results being delayed.

Perret says on election day the clerk of court is in charge of tabulation of all votes.

The registrar’s office is tasked with early voting. The paper ballots are made up of fax and emailed ballots that come from military and civilians oversees,” Perret said.

Perret says Lafayette Parish had about 1,300 of those ballots that had to pass through the reader.

“Like the number two pencil and you fill in the little oval the optical scan reader malfunctioned; and so the total number of ballots cast, which we knew how many ballots were cast, were not the total number counted.”

“On Saturday night we had a few technical difficulties and the process of scanning absentee ballots took longer than in previous years. The extra time was necessary to ensure all ballots were counted correctly,” Registrar of Voters Charlene Meaux Menard explained in a released statement.

“Start an hour earlier and hopefully that scanner doesn’t give us a glitch or a hiccup. That’s what we are going to try to do,” Perret added.