Madras High Court reserves orders on M.K. Stalin’s plea to declare him elected from Kolathur constituency

The Madras High Court on Monday (August 31, 2026) reserved its orders on a writ petition filed by DMK president M.K. Stalin to order 100% counting of VVPAT slips of the Kolathur Assembly constituency, and to consequently declare him the returned candidate after nullifying the election of TVK MLA V.S. Babu.

The First Division Bench of Chief Justice Sushrut Arvind Dharmadhikari and Justice G. Arul Murugan deferred their verdict after hearing the arguments advanced by senior counsel Kapil Sibal for the former Chief Minister and senior counsel G. Rajagopal and Dama Seshadri Naidu for the Election Commission of India (ECI).

The ECI counsel contended that the writ petition was not maintainable at all in view of Article 329(b) of the Constitution and Section 80 of the Representation of the People Act, 1951, which categorically state that an election to a parliamentary or Assembly constituency could be challenged only by way of an election petition.

Entertaining a “cleverly and artfully” drafted writ petition to set aside an election would lead to the opening of a pandora’s box, and numerous such writ petitions may get filed in the High Court in the future for setting aside validly held elections to Parliament and the Legislative Assemblies, the counsel said.

Stalin’s argument

On the other hand, Mr. Sibal argued that the present case does not stem out of any constitutional or statutory provision but a 2024 Supreme Court judgment, in Association for Democratic Reforms versus Election Commission of India, which permitted either the runner-up or the third-place-holder in a parliamentary/Assembly election to make a request for the checking and verification of the burnt memory/microcontroller in 5% of the EVMs by a team of engineers from the EVM manufacturers.

Since the top court had ordered that any such application for verification must be made within seven days of declaration of the result, Mr. Stalin, who lost by a margin of 8,795 votes by securing 74,202 votes as against 82,997 votes garnered by Mr. Babu, had duly made such application within three days from the declaration of the election results on May 4, 2026.

However, the ECI began the verification of 14 out of 286 EVM sets used in Kolathur only on July 29, 2026, well after the expiry of the 45-day period for filing an election petition, and completed it on August 5, 2026. Highlighting that the writ petitioner had come across serious anomalies in the working of the EVM sets during the verification process, with one of the units not being able to identify the petitioner’s name, Mr. Sibal said: “Whether Your Lordships give me relief or not is another matter, but this must be investigated. What’s the explanation for this?”

Further, underlining that the writ petitioner could not file an election petition only because of the delay caused by the ECI in commencing the verification process, the senior counsel said that the petitioner could not be let go remediless because of the delay in which the he had no role to play.

Another writ petition withdrawn

Mr. Stalin’s counsel withdrew another writ petition filed by him, challenging certain provisions of the SOP framed by the ECI for the verification of 5% of the EVM sets. The petition was withdrawn, with liberty to file a fresh case, after the judges pointed out that the petitioner had wrongly challenged the 2024 SOP though that had been superseded by the 2025 SOP under which the verification was carried out this year with respect to the Kolathur constituency.