By Greg Giroux, CQ Staff

Voters in Louisiana’s 1st and 6th Districts on Saturday began what will now be a long process of filling vacancies in the U.S. House. Both districts will need another round of balloting April 5 to set the candidate fields for special general elections May 3.

Runoff elections are needed next month because one or both of the two major parties in each district did not produce majority-vote winners in Saturday’s primary elections. Louisiana law requires a runoff election between the top two vote-getters in any primary in which no candidate receives a majority of all votes cast.

In Louisiana’s 6th, which Republican Richard H. Baker vacated last month after more than two decades representing the Baton Rouge area, Republican Woody Jenkins almost escaped a runoff election.

Jenkins, a newspaper executive and former state representative who lost a close race for the U.S. Senate in 1996, got 49.85 percent of the vote and, in the runoff, will face Laurinda Calongne, a consulting company owner who finished second with 26 percent of the vote. The other major candidate in the Republican primary was Paul Sawyer, Baker’s former chief of staff, who had 23 percent.

The Republican winner will face the victor of a Democratic runoff in which the contestants will be state Reps. Don Cazayoux , who garnered 35 percent, and Michael Jackson, who won 27 percent. They topped a five-candidate Democratic field that also included Jason DeCuir, a lawyer who came away with 19 percent, and Andy Kopplin, who served as chief of staff to Republican former Gov. Mike Foster and Democratic former Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco and who also netted 17 percent. CQ Politics rates the race as Leans Republican.

The two-party contest in the 6th District will be much more competitive than the one in the 1st, a Republican bastion in and around New Orleans that Republican Bobby Jindal vacated in January, three months after he was elected governor while serving his second House term. CQ Politics rates this race as Safe Republican.

In the Republican primary, state Sen. Steve Scalise and state Rep. Tim Burns will compete in a Republican runoff after taking 48 percent and 28 percent respectively in Saturday’s vote. The other major candidate was Slidell mayor Ben Morris, who had 21 percent of the vote.

Scalise dominated the vote in the three 1st District parishes that are south of Lake Pontchartrain. He finished behind Burns and Morris in St. Tammany Parish, the most populous jurisdiction on the North Shore.

The winner of the Scalise-Burns runoff will be overwhelmingly favored to defeat Democrat Gilda Reed, a psychology professor who won her party’s lower-profile primary with 70 percent of the vote. A Democrat has not represented Louisiana’s 1st in more than 30 years, and President Bush took 70 percent of the district vote in the 2004 election.