Madras HC to Decide on Stalin’s Petition Challenging TVK Win in Kolathur

The Madras High Court on Monday stated that it will decide on the maintainability of a petition filed by former Chief Minister M.K. Stalin challenging the election victory of Tamilaga Vetri Kazhagam (TVK) candidate V.S. Babu from the Kolathur constituency in the 2026 Assembly elections.

A division bench comprising Chief Justice Sushrut Arvind Dharmadhikari and Justice G. Arul Murugan noted that orders regarding maintainability will be passed after hearing arguments from senior advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for Stalin, and senior lawyer Sheshadri Naidu, representing the Election Commission of India (ECI).

In his plea, the DMK leader challenged the election outcome by citing technical faults in Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) as well as discrepancies and mismatches in the counting of votes across VVPAT units, control units, and ballot units. Stalin stated that the EVMs exhibiting defects, breaches, and failures accounted for a 29.87 per cent vote share, which proved decisive in determining the final result.

The petition sought a direction to the ECI to declare Babu's election null and void. The former Chief Minister also requested the court to direct election authorities to execute a 100 per cent count of VVPAT slips and conduct a complete verification of all 286 EVMs deployed across the Kolathur constituency within a fixed timeframe.

According to the petition, one VVPAT each at polling stations 28 and 75 stopped functioning during verification, and the reasons for these technical failures were not provided. The plea added that the location of VVPAT-printed slips from 14 polling stations remains unknown.

Stalin further pointed out that two ballot units failed to correspond with the address tags of polling station 79. In another instance at polling station 208, the control unit failed to detect Stalin’s name on the connected ballot unit during checking, raising questions regarding the total number of faulty control units and unaccounted ballot units.